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At the heart of the crisis wrought by conciliarism--and all of its antecedent roots in the Modernist movement that brought it to fruition--is the belief that "modern man" needs a "modern message" about God to which he can relate. Alleged "insights" from the scientific and social scientific communities in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries convinced alleged theologians that the Faith had to be re-thought in its entirety in order to make it "credible" to "modern man."
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Modernists and their progeny, the "new thinkers," of which the former Joseph Ratzinger is one, seek to make complex that which is simple, starting with the nature of man himself. All sorts of convoluted theories and hypotheses have been devised to explain who man is and how he can know his "identity" in this world. Benedict XVI, for example, has read volumes upon volumes of works in his nearly eighty years of life dealing with this subject. His Principles of Catholic Theology, published in German in 1982 but actually a series of reflections written at different times that were woven together in took form, is an effort to note the concerns expressed by various philosophers and theologians, including numerous Protestant theologians and the usual suspects from the "new theology" in Catholicism (Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner) in order to arrive at a "synthesis" by which the Protestant and the Orthodox can be brought into some sort of communion with the Catholic Church. Principles of Catholic Theology was indeed an effort to "re-think" the Faith anew.
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Apart from the very flawed premises of the "new theology," critiqued so well by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 10, 1950, the whole enterprise of discovering the identity of "man" is utterly unnecessary. We know who man is. He is a rational creature made in the image and likeness of God, possessing an intellect and a will. Man has been made by God to know, to love, and to serve Him in this life as He has revealed Himself through His true Church so that he can be happy forever in Heaven.
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Man has a fallen human nature as a result of Original Sin, giving him a darkened intellect and a weakened will that need to be brought into conformity with God's Intellect and Will by means of Sanctifying Grace. Man has been redeemed by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb on the wood of the Holy Cross, thus giving him access to the life-saving graces by which he can carry his own daily crosses and thus help to repay the debt of his own sins and those of the whole world in this mortal vale of tears. Man is meant to take heart from the surety and certainty of the Catholic Faith, knowing that he has a loving Mother whose own Immaculate Heart is his safe refuge that will lead him to the font of Divine Mercy flowing from the Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, especially in the Sacrament of Penance.
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Human life is a struggle between sin and Grace. Human beings can only know happiness and peace and order in their own lives if they are striving for personal sanctity as members of the Catholic Church. The entirety of social order and authentic peace, that of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, among nations depends upon the well-being of souls. Indeed, the entirety of the civil state and of popular culture must be oriented to helping man realize his Last End, fostering those conditions in society that will advance man's Last End as a member of the Catholic Church, which must be recognized by the civil state as the one and true religion.
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These are simple truths that never become "outdated." God knows that it is difficult enough because of our fallen nature to live in accord with His Commandments and to grow in sanctity. He does not want us spending our lives attempting to "discover" that which He has revealed plainly and exclusively in the Catholic Church. There is only the need for men and their nations to to submit in a spirit of humility and docility to the reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen over them, both individually and collectively.
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Fallen human nature, however, seeks to find more complex "answers" to the problems in the world that have their origin in Original Sin and in each man's Actual Sins and can be ameliorated only by a daily reliance upon the supernatural helps afforded man by the Catholic Church. Joseph Ratzinger, you see, believes that truth has not been deposited exclusively to the Catholic Church, which is why he believes that Protestants, including the father of all modern heretics, Martin Luther, have something to "contribute" to understanding how a new "synthesis" can be created to "bridge the gap" between "believers." Such a view means that the Catholic Church is imperfect, that she does have everything within herself to safeguard and transmit the Deposit of Faith capably without the "insights" of those who reject her teaching authority and have concocted "paradigms" that contradict articles of the Faith she has defined under the infallible guidance of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost.
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Benedict XVI is an Hegelian who sees that the acceptance of truth is conditioned by time and circumstance, which is why his use of the word "tradition" must not be permitted to fool those who are impressed with its frequent invocation. Authentic Catholic Tradition means no more to Benedict XVI than the word "is" means to William Jefferson Clinton (or to any other secular positivist).
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Indeed, as will be demonstrated later in this commentary, Joseph Ratzinger identifies a strict adherence to Catholic Tradition with the Pharisaical adherence to the letter of the Mosaic laws. Mere human customs have to give way to the "spirit" of the law of "love." Catholics who are unwilling to reassess the meaning of Tradition, therefore, and to read the Fathers of the Church in light of the new currents of thought that have developed without the "distortions" produced by Scholasticism are the new Pharisees, people who must be resisted as enemies of the "proper" implementation of the Second Vatican Council, whose teachings represent a new "Pentecost" of the "spirit" in the life of the Church, breathing new meaning into her reflection on the identify of man in light of the Paschal Mystery.
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Although careful to posit the Hegelian view of truth in a scholarly manner at the beginning of Principles of Catholic Theology without committing himself to an uncritical acceptance of it, Joseph Ratzinger makes is clear throughout his book that his theological approach is indeed Hegelian. He is searching for a synthesis of Faith that will satisfy some Protestants, especially those Lutherans who adhere to the Augsburg Confession, and the Orthodox into a form of union with the Catholic Church. Ratzinger/Benedict reveals this approach at the beginning of Principles of Catholic Theology:
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This awareness of change, which is thus the real force behind the question, is in part just a reflection of particular experiences, but it is also in part a product of philosophical movements that have appropriated these experiences and made them the whole structure of reality. The old problem of being and time, which the Eleatic School, and later Plato and Aristotle, solved almost exclusively in favor of being, raises its head anew. The decisive turning point lies with Hegel, since which being and time have been more and more intertwined in philosophical thinking. It cannot be assigned, therefore, to any particular point in history or be viewed as something existing in itself outside of history: all its historical objectifications are but improvements in the whole of which they are parts. This view gives rise to two opposing positions. On the one hand, the philosophy of history of ideas seeks to bring about a universal reconciliation: all that has hitherto been thought has meaning as a moment of the whole; it can be understood and classified as a moment in the self-evolution of the logos. In such a view, both the Catholic and the Protestant interpretations of Christianity have meaning, each in its own way, they are true in their historical moment, but they can remain true only by being abandoned when their hour has come and assimilated into the newly developing whole. Truth becomes a function of time, the true is not that which simply is true, for truth is not simply that which is, it is true for a time because it is part of the becoming of truth, which is by becoming. This means that, of their very nature, the contours between true and untrue are less sharply defined, it means above all that man's basic attitude toward reality and toward himself must be altered. In such a view, fidelity to yesterday's truth consists precisely in abandoning it, in assimilating it into today's truth; assimilation becomes the form of preservation. What was constitutive yesterday is constitutive today only as that which has been assimilated. In the realm of Marxist thought, on the other hand, this ideology of reconciliation (as it might be called) is converted into an ideology of revolution, assimilation becomes transformation. The concept of the continuity of being in the changeableness of time is now understood as an ideological superstructure conditioned by the interests of those who are favored by things as they are. It is thus a response that runs counter to the logic of history, which demands progress and forbids lingering in the status quo. The notion of truth comes to be regarded as an expression of the vested interests of a particular historical movement; it gives place to the notion of progress: the "true" is whatever serves progress, that is, whatever serves the logic of history. Vested interest on the one hand and progress on the other lay claims to the legacy of truth; the "true," that is, what is in accord with the logic of history, must be sought at every step of history because anything that is designated as an enduring truth is in direct contradiction with the logic of history, is but the static vested interest of a given moment.
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Although these two viewpoints seldom manifest themselves in the schematic purity with which they are here described, the basic orientation with regard to the relationship of being and time that is at the root of them is nonetheless firmly entrenched. the ultimate decision about the question we have raised lies, not in the material dispute about individual Christian teachings, but here, in the realm of their philosophical presumptions. Discussions about content remain isolated and losing skirmishes if no consideration is given to the question: If there, in the course of historical time, a recognizable identity of man with himself? Is there a human "nature"? Is there a truth that remains true in every historical time because it is true? The questions of hermeneutics is, in the last analysis, the ontological one, the question of the oneness of truth in the multiplicity of its historical manifestations. (Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 16-18.)
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Truth is truth. It is immutable because its author, God, Who is Truth, is immutable. Although it is certainly useful for a scholar to study Protestant thought so as to critique its flaws, it is simply not in the service of truth to suggest that Protestant thought somehow "completes" our understanding of Divine Revelation, that it makes "truth" more "relevant" to modern man, that the Catholic Church must reconcile herself with this thought, assimilating it undo herself, to effect a new synthesis for the "modern" age. Joseph Ratzinger's bias in this regard is quite clear. It is demonstrated throughout Principles of Catholic Theology, as will be demonstrated at length.
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Modernists must view everything anew. It is part of their overweening pride. Statements purporting to be true must be reduced to the "historical context" in which they were made. Pope Saint Pius X commented on this in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907:
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Although they express their astonishment that We should number them amongst the enemies of the Church, no one will be reasonably surprised that We should do so, if, leaving out of account the internal disposition of the soul, of which God alone is the Judge, he considers their tenets, their manner of speech, and their action. Nor indeed would he be wrong in regarding them as the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For, as We have said, they put into operation their designs for her undoing, not from without but from within. Hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate. Moreover, they lay the ax not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers. And once having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to diffuse poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt. Further, none is more skillful, none more astute than they, in the employment of a thousand noxious devices; for they play the double part of rationalist and Catholic, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error; and as audacity is their chief characteristic, there is no conclusion of any kind from which they shrink or which they do not thrust forward with pertinacity and assurance To this must be added the fact, which indeed is well calculated to deceive souls, that they lead a life of the greatest activity, of assiduous and ardent application to every branch of learning, and that they possess, as a rule, a reputation for irreproachable morality. Finally, there is the fact which is all hut fatal to the hope of cure that their very doctrines have given such a bent to their minds, that they disdain all authority and brook no restraint; and relying upon a false conscience, they attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy. . . .
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So far, Venerable Brethren, there has been no mention of the intellect. It also, according to the teaching of the Modernists, has its part in the act of faith. And it is of importance to see how. In that sense of which We have frequently spoken, since sense is not knowledge, they say God, indeed, presents Himself to man, but in a manner so confused and indistinct that He can hardly be perceived by the believer. It is therefore necessary that a certain light should be cast upon this sense so that God may clearly stand out in relief and be set apart from it. This is the task of the intellect, whose office it is to reflect and to analyze; and by means of it, man first transforms into mental pictures the vital phenomena which arise within him, and then expresses them in words. Hence the common saying of Modernists: that the religious man must think his faith. The mind then, encountering this .sense, throws itself upon it, and works in it after the manner of a painter who restores to greater clearness the lines of a picture that have been dimmed with age. The simile is that of one of the leaders of Modernism. The operation of the mind in this work is a double one: first, by a natural and spontaneous act it expresses its concept in a simple, popular statement; then, on reflection and deeper consideration, or, as they say, by elaborating its thought, it expresses the idea in secondary propositions, which are derived from the first, but are more precise and distinct. These secondary propositions, if they finally receive the approval of the supreme magisterium of the Church, constitute dogma. . . .
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To proceed in an orderly manner in this somewhat abstruse subject, it must first of all be noted that the Modernist sustains and includes within himself a manifold personality; he is a philosopher, a believer, a theologian, an historian, a critic, an apologist, a reformer. These roles must be clearly distinguished one from another by all who would accurately understand their system and thoroughly grasp the principles and the outcome of their doctrines.
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This is very important as he knows that the approach of conciliarism and its novelties, especially religious liberty and ecumenism, are irreconcilable with the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church. This is evident to anyone who knows the history of the Church. He must, therefore, attempt to convince Catholics that past dogmatic pronouncements and papal encyclical letters that reiterated the consistent teaching of the Church are no longer reliable or binding because the historical "context" in which they occurred has become "obsolete." For all of his protestations to the contrary, Joseph Ratzinger is really saying that truth is mutable, and since God is the author of all Truth he is saying, whether or not he intends to so say it, that God is mutable.
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Ratzinger's late mentor, Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, believed that the "bastions" of the Catholic Church had to be "razed," that is torn down, destroyed. Part of those "bastions," which have provided a "false security" to Catholics, is the belief that the Catholic Church is in possession of the fullness of truth, that to her exclusively has been given the Deposit of Faith. We must learn from others by means of "dialogue" in order to assimilate their views into ours. An important means to realize this goal is to eliminate the reliance upon simple "creedal" formulas of belief in various articles of the Faith, learned by rote memorization that come to convince the Catholic that these simply expressed truths are the essence of what he needs to know as a Catholic. This particular "bastion" must be razed entirely in order to open Catholics up to the "reality" that our preconceived notions of Faith can be expressed differently so as to accommodate them to the beliefs of others. Part of this process is learning to live with contradiction and confusion as a normal part of Catholic life.
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For instance, after stating that catechesis cannot be based on a rejection of "yesterday's truth" with "today's truth," which is a sound enough proposition as far as it goes, Benedict/Ratzinger wrote:
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Our principal need today is not primarily new formulas; on the contrary, we must confess to a superfluity of unheeded words. Our principal need is for a reconstruction of the existential context of catechumenal training in the faith as the source of a common experience of the Spirit that can also become the foundation of a realistic reflection. Undoubtedly, this will give rise to new formulations in which the central truths of the Christian faith will be expressed in a way that is both easily remembered and easily understood. Even more important than the brief answers that can be found in any catechism will be a coherent logic of faith in which even partial answers have their place. Formulas live by the logic that supports them; but logic lives by the logos, the meaning, which does not reveal itself without the cooperation of life--it is bound to the "circle" of communio that can be penetrated only by the union of thought and life. (p. 26.)
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Although the Baltimore Catechism was not perfect, it taught the Faith very clearly. The tenets it presented could be remembered easily, providing the seed ground upon which Sanctifying Grace could work over time to deepen our understanding of what we learned. Generations of Catholics learned the Faith this way, equipping them to become excellent mothers and fathers and defenders of the Faith to their non-Catholic friends and neighbors and co-workers. Ah, this bastion--and others like it--had to be razed in order for a more "mature" understanding. We must return to "primitive" sources" in order to find the means to relate to "modern" man, assimilating from others if it is deemed necessary to do so.
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Pope Saint Pius X pinpointed exactly the Modernism espoused by Ratzinger/Benedict throughout Principles of Catholic Theology. The sainted pontiff noted in Pascendi Dominici Gregis:
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We have thus reached one of the principal points in the Modernist's system, namely, the origin and the nature of dogma. For they place the origin of dogma in those primitive and simple formulas, which, under a certain aspect, are necessary to faith; for revelation, to be truly such, requires the clear knowledge of God in the consciousness. But dogma itself, they apparently hold, strictly consists in the secondary formulas.
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To ascertain the nature of dogma, we must first find the relation which exists between the religious formulas and the religious sense. This will be readily perceived by anyone who holds that these formulas have no other purpose than to furnish the believer with a means of giving to himself an account of his faith. These formulas therefore stand midway between the believer and his faith; in their relation to the faith they are the inadequate expression of its object, and are usually called symbols; in their relation to the believer they are mere instruments.
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Hence it is quite impossible to maintain that they absolutely contain the truth: for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man; and as instruments, they are the vehicles of truth, and must therefore in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sense. But the object of the religious sense, as something contained in the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes can avail himself of varying conditions. Consequently, the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion.
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Dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed. This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and clearly flows from their principles. For among the chief points of their teaching is the following, which they deduce from the principle of vital immanence, namely, that religious formulas if they are to be really religious and not merely intellectual speculations, ought to be living and to live the life of the religious sense. This is not to be understood to mean that these formulas, especially if merely imaginative, were to be invented for the religious sense. Their origin matters nothing, any more than their number or quality. What is necessary is that the religious sense -- with some modification when needful -- should vitally assimilate them. In other words, it is necessary that the primitive formula be accepted and sanctioned by the heart; and similarly the subsequent work from which are brought forth the secondary formulas must proceed under the guidance of the heart. Hence it comes that these formulas, in order to be living, should be, and should remain, adapted to the faith and to him who believes. Wherefore, if for any reason this adaptation should cease to exist, they lose their first meaning and accordingly need to be changed. In view of the fact that the character and lot of dogmatic formulas are so unstable, it is no wonder that Modernists should regard them so lightly and in such open disrespect, and have no consideration or praise for anything but the religious sense and for the religious life. In this way, with consummate audacity, they criticize the Church, as having strayed from the true path by failing to distinguish between the religious and moral sense of formulas and their surface meaning, and by clinging vainly and tenaciously to meaningless formulas, while religion itself is allowed to go to ruin. "Blind'- they are, and "leaders of the blind" puffed up with the proud name of science, they have reached that pitch of folly at which they pervert the eternal concept of truth and the true meaning of religion; in introducing a new system in which "they are seen to be under the sway of a blind and unchecked passion for novelty, thinking not at all of finding some solid foundation of truth, but despising the holy and apostolic traditions, they embrace other and vain, futile, uncertain doctrines, unapproved by the Church, on which, in the height of their vanity, they think they can base and maintain truth itself."
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Pope Saint Pius X went on in Pascendi to eviscerate--and I mean to tear to shreds as absolutely Modernist--Ratzinger's concept of Tradition, shared as it is by all of the "new thinkers:"
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There is yet another element in this part of their teaching which is absolutely contrary to Catholic truth. For what is laid down as to experience is also applied with destructive effect to tradition, which has always been maintained by the Catholic Church. Tradition, as understood by the Modernists, is a communication with others of an original experience, through preaching by means of the intellectual formula. To this formula, in addition to its representative value they attribute a species of suggestive efficacy which acts firstly in the believer by stimulating the religious sense, should it happen to have grown sluggish, and by renewing the experience once acquired, and secondly, in those who do not yet believe by awakening in them for the first time the religious sense and producing the experience. In this way is religious experience spread abroad among the nations; and not merely among contemporaries by preaching, but among future generations both by books and by oral transmission from one to another. Sometimes this communication of religious experience takes root and thrives, at other times it withers at once and dies. For the Modernists, to live is a proof of truth, since for them life and truth are one and the same thing. Thus we are once more led to infer that all existing religions are equally true, for otherwise they would not survive.
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To wit, the Preacher to the Papal Household, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M., Cap., said in a "homily" delivered in the presence of John Paul II in the Basilica of Saint Peter on Good Friday, 2002, that Protestants "churches" exist by the will of God by the mere fact that they exist. God would let them exist if He did not want to, right? Well, no, God permits evil to occur so that good might drawn out of it. The fact that a particular evil exists does not mean that God wants it to persist in existence, less yet that he wants Catholics to participate in it or to give their approval to it. This statement has been ratified by the words and actions of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who have told Protestants to be "faithful" to their "traditions," which implies that those "traditions" are valid and contain within themselves the means to save their adherents.
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Deconstructing the Meaning of the Words "Sacraments" and "Catholic" and "Unity" and "Redemption"
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Central to the creation of a "new synthesis" of Faith to appeal to "modern" man is to redefine terms. As noted above, Tradition itself must be redefined, one of the most essential elements of Modernism critiqued so well by Pope Saint Pius X. So must the words "Sacraments" and "Catholic" be redefined so as to strip it from its identification with "triumphalism" and a narrow sectarianism that impedes the the direction of the "spirit" in the life of the Church.
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Relying upon the late Father Henri de Lubac, Benedict/Ratzinger stated in Principles of Catholic Theology that the Second Vatican Council endorsed a whole new paradigm of the the Church and of her sacraments:
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What is being expressed here is, first of all, a collective view of Christianity to replace the individual or purely institutional manner of thinking. It was in this framework that Henri de Lubac's designation of the Church as a sacrament made its appearance in the 1930s. De Lubac was deeply affected by the lapse of faith that occurred no longer under the aegis of an agnostic philosophy but in the name of humanism, in the name of suffering humanity, in the name of a humanity that is a community and demands the service of all. At the beginning of his book Catholicisme; les aspects soiciaux du dogme, he placed a quotation from Jean Giono that he regarded as a most pungent criticism of the Christian way: "Am I supposed to have joy? Alas, no. . . . Only my joy! And that is something terribly different. The joy of Jesus can be personal. It can belong to one man alone, and he is saved. He is a t peace; his he joyful, but he is not alone. . . . When affliction lays siege to my gates, I can longer quiet myself with the blandishments of genius. Only then will my joy be lasting when it is the joy of all. I don't want to pass through the battlefields with a rose in my hand." The concept of a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven, is for de Lubac that caricature of Christianity that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made possible the rise of atheism. The concept of sacraments as the means of a grace that I receive like a supernatural medicine in order, as it were, to ensure only my private eternal health is the supreme misunderstanding of what a sacrament truly is. (p. 49)
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I wish that those who are upset with me for raising questions about the theology of the former Joseph Ratzinger would actually consider the apostasy contained in the ostensibly reigning pontiff's words above. "The concept of sacraments as the means of a grace that I receive like a supernatural medicine in order, as it were, to ensure only private eternal health is the supreme misunderstanding of what a sacrament truly is." The sacraments have been given us by Our Lord to save our individual souls. We are judged by Him individually, not collectively. The atheistic movements of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries arose as the logical consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it was exercised by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages that was the explicit goal of Martin Luther, for whom Benedict/Ratzinger professes such great admiration, and Judeo-Masonry and all of the many movements it helped to spawn. To blame a correct understanding of the sacraments for the rise of atheistic movements is absurd and blasphemous.
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Mr. James Larson, writing in the April, 2006, issue of Christian Order, had this to say about the "new theology" of Henri de Lubac:
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De Lubac detested the idea of grace as being something "merely added" to human nature. And since from the standpoint of "non-contradiction" it is impossible to maintain the truth concerning the gratuitousness of God’s grace in regards to human nature without the Thomistic notion of grace as "superadded" to nature, de Lubac finds it necessary again to invoke his principle of "paradox." As David Schindler writes in the Introduction to de Lubac’s Mystery of the Supernatural:
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"De Lubac sees it necessary to insist on the simultaneity - and hence just so far the paradox - of the two elements of the twin claim implied here: on the one hand, a gratuity of grace distinct from and unanticipated (but not merely ‘super-added’ to) human nature; on the other hand, a human nature always already called to a divine vocation in Jesus Christ, and hence just so far imbedded from the outset in a supernatural order (p. xxvi).'
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De Lubac, in other words, wishes to be able to assert the traditional teaching concerning the gratuity of God’s gift of supernatural life, while at the same time also affirming its opposite.
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St. Thomas, on the other hand, often teaches the truth that grace must be understood as something which is added or superadded to human nature. He writes:
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"Higher intelligible things the human intellect cannot know, unless it be perfected by a stronger light, viz. the light of faith or prophecy which is called the light of grace, inasmuch as it is added to nature. ST, I-II, Q.109,A.1"
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It is this profound and absolutely necessary distinction between the life of God and human nature which such persons as de Lubac and von Balthasar (and also Eastern Orthodox theology) attempt to erase. And it is the teaching of St. Thomas, the primary bulwark against error in this area of Catholic doctrine, that they must demolish or pervert.
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For de Lubac, it is a matter of perversion. No single subject occupies more space in his writings than the relationship between nature and grace. And throughout these writings, he attempts to subvert the words of St. Thomas to his own particular heresy.
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These subversions rest upon one extraordinarily pathetic error in regard to the thought of St. Thomas. De Lubac attempts to make Thomas say that there exists in human nature, before consciousness, an innate desire for God. In fact, St Thomas teaches just the opposite:
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"On the contrary, the human soul is naturally like a blank tablet on which nothing is written, as the Philosopher says (De Anima iii,4 ). But the nature of the soul is the same now as it would have been in the state of innocence. Therefore the souls of children would have been without knowledge at birth.[ST, I, Q.101, A.1]"
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At the same time, St. Thomas rightly speaks of a knowledge, love, and desire of God which are the natural response of the human mind in its encounter with the world. Thus, the "light" of the human mind, created in the image of God, is structured in such a way as not only to be able to reason to the existence of God from such things as the existence of intelligent design and causation in the world; but it is also "naturally" led to love this God, and to naturally desire to see and know His essence.
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Nor does all this knowledge, love, and desire of God necessarily have to be the conscious, reasoned process of the philosopher. We may also rightly speak of a sort of natural, intuitive apprehension of the existence and Being of God from the average person’s encounter with the created world.
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All this is simply in keeping with St. Paul’s statement in Romans 1:20: "For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity…"
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St Paul even goes so far as to say that the existence and nature of God is so overwhelmingly evident from the human mind’s encounter with creation that for man not to acknowledge His reality and presence is "inexcusable." St. Thomas writes: "all knowers know God implicitly in all they know." [De Veritate, Q. 22, a.2]
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What is absolutely essential to keep in mind, however, is that all of this "natural" knowledge, love, and desire of God is not present except through the encounter of man’s mind with the world, and through his senses. It is, in other words, natural, but not innate.
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Destructive Consequences
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De Lubac, and proponents of the "New Theology" in general, simply do not understand "the God of scholastic theology."
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To them, the God of St. Thomas and the traditional Church is not sufficiently "vitally immanent." The God Who created us in His own Image, and sustains us every second of our lives with this same creative action; the God Who died for our sins and for our eternal salvation, and draws us into His very own life through baptism and the other sacraments; the God Who gives His Own Son in Holy Communion, Who insures that we are in possession of infallible truth through His Church, and promises His faithful the Gift of the Beatific Vision - this God, and this faith, are too sterile, absolute, and pharisaical for them.
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The problem for these people seems to be that all that constitutes the traditional Catholic concept of grace and supernatural life is considered as Gift, and not something that is their own by right, or by nature.
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They choose to barter the Infinite Gift of God for the paltry personal possession of an ounce of supernatural life which is somehow independent of this Gift. It is almost unbelievable foolishness; but even more, it amounts to infinite ingratitude.
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What we may be sure of is the enormously destructive consequences of their effort. Again, we have the wisdom of Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi [#34]:
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"The domineering overbearance of those who teach these errors, and the thoughtless compliance of the more shallow minds who assent to them, create a corrupted atmosphere which penetrates everywhere, and carries infection with it."
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It has penetrated everywhere. It penetrated to the heart of Fr. Joseph Ratzinger when he said that the survival of Catholicism depended on it being freed from the "constraining fetters of Roman Scholastic Theology." We are now experiencing that freedom - the very freedom which has virtually destroyed the faith of Catholic Europe and much of the rest of the world. It is this atmosphere, created by Modernist philosophy and theology in response to reductive secular science, which must be combated as the primary source of decay in the Church.
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Once again, in all fairness to Mr. Larson, it must be noted that he has no doubt that the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is the legitimate Pope, that Benedict has not disqualified himself to serve as the Successor of Saint Peter. Be that as it may, however, Mr. Larson's analysis of the thought of De Lubac, containing within itself contradiction after contradiction, and its absolute opposition to Catholic Truth must be considered by all thoughtful Catholics.
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Deconstructing the Particular Judgment and the Resurrection of Our Lord
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Joseph Ratzinger has a view of the sacraments that is heretical. Although we need the prayers of the members of the Catholic Church (Militant, Suffering, Triumphant) to help us to cooperate with Sanctifying Grace, it is indeed the case that the only thing upon which we are judged is our own individual relationship to God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church. True, that relationship involves a duty to be charitable to others, starting with doing all that is possible by prayer and by word and deed to seek their salvation as members of the Catholic Church, in accord with the example of Our Lord, Our Lady and all of the saints. Nevertheless, the Particular Judgment is on our souls individually. Have we persisted until the end in a state of Sanctifying Grace? Yes, indeed, it will be the Dies Irae, the day of wrath, if we have not so persisted.
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Not so for Joseph Ratzinger, however. He does not believe in the Dies Irae, the day of wrath. A disciple of the false notion of "love" possessed by Von Balthasar, the progenitor of the false belief of "universal salvation, Ratzinger wrote the following in his Introduction to Christianity:
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“The early Christians, with their cry ‘Our Lord, come’, interpreted the second coming of Jesus as an event full of hope and joy… To the Christians of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, that moment appeared as the terrifying ‘day of wrath’ (Dies irae)… Perhaps it will have to be admitted that the tendency to such a "false" development, which only sees the dangers of responsibility and no longer the freedom of love, is already present in the [Apostles’] Creed, in which the idea of Christ’s second coming is reduced, at any rate verbally, to the idea of judgment: ‘He will come again to the judge the living and the dead.’”
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This is not Catholicism. The Catholic Church has taught consistently prior to the advent of the "happy times" inaugurated by the admirer of the Sillon and companion of the Modernists, Angelo Roncalli, that men must prepare themselves well for the Particular Judgment. I included the entirety of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori's sermon on the Particular Judgment in Not a Believer in Universal Salvation (which also included a link to Saint Leonard of Port Maurice's The Little Number of Those Who are Saved). Here is another reflection offered by the founder of the Congregation of the Holy Redeemer, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori on the Delusion of Sinners:
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But God is merciful. Behold another common delusion, by which the Devil encourages sinners to persevere in a life of sin! A certain author has said, that more souls have been sent to Hell by the mercy of God, than by his justice. This is indeed the case; for men are induced by the deceits of the Devil to persevere in sin; through confidence in God's mercy; and thus they are lost. God is merciful. who denies it? But, great as is his mercy, how many doe she every day send to Hell? God is merciful, but he is also just, and is therefore obliged to punish those who offend him. "And his mercy," says the divine mother, "to them that fear him"--Luke, i. 50. But with regard to those who abuse his mercy and despise him, he exercises justice. The Lord pardons sins; but he cannot pardon the determination to commit sin. St. Augustine says, that he who sins with the intention of repenting after his sin, is not a penitent but a scoffer. "Irrisor est non poenitens". But the Apostle tells us us that God will not be mocked. "Be not deceived: God is not mocked"--(Gal., vi. 7. It would be a mockery of God to insult him as often and as much as yo pleased, and afterwards to expect eternal glory. (Sermon XVI, Delusions of Sinners, Sermons of St. Alphonsus Liguori)
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Saint Paul himself taught us in his Epistle to the Philippians:
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Wherefore, my dearly beloved, (as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but much more now in my absence,) with fear and trembling work out your salvation. For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will. And do ye all things without murmurings and hesitations; That you may be blameless, and sincere children of God, without reproof, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation; among whom you shine as lights in the world. (Phil. 2: 12-15)
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Saint Paul also taught that the bodily Resurrection of Our Lord was a fact, that if it did not actually happen our Faith is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men:
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Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again from the dead, how do some among you say, that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God: because we have given testimony against God, that he hath raised up Christ; whom he hath not raised up, if the dead rise not again.
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For if the dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins. Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now Christ is risen from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep:
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For by a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead. And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.
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But every one in his own order: the firstfruits Christ, then they that are of Christ, who have believed in his coming. Afterwards the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God and the Father, when he shall have brought to nought all principality, and power, and virtue. For he must reign, until he hath put all his enemies under his feet. (1 Cor. 1: 12-25 )
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The former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger does not see things so clearly, as he wrote in Principles of Catholic Theology:
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The raising of Jesus from the dead is portrayed as his elevation over all the powers of this world, including the hitherto invincible power of death, and as his investiture in the eschatological kingdom of God, toward which all the hope of the Old Testament is directed. The sentence "Jesus has risen" thus expresses the primitive experience on which all Christian faith is grounded; all further confessions are interpretations of this original one, including the confession of Jesus as the Messiah, of the "Christ-ness" of Jesus, however the historical Jesus as it is later remembered may be operative here. "Jesus has risen"--this sentence is thus, above all, the true articulus stantis et cadendtis ecclesiae by which the structure of faith and theology are chiefly to be determined.
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With this statement we seem to be again at the heart of the conflict with which we started, since the Resurrection is understood by one group as a historical event and as part of the long line of salvation history but by the other as the eschatological event that transcends all history, that leaves history shattered in its wake and is present in the kerygma as the totally other. Although the futility of expecting an unqualified interpretation where there is question of what is ultimate and essential has thus again been confirmed, I believe, nonetheless, that, in the last part of these reflections, I can draw from the doctrinal core we have defined a few guidelines for the course theology should take between salvation history and metaphysics, between salvation history and eschatology. (p. 184)
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There is a "conflict" here only because Joseph Ratzinger accepts as credible the views of those who want to make Our Lord's Resurrection appear to have taken place outside of the context of actual history, posing the old Modernist conflict between the "Jesus of history" and the "Jesus of Faith." "Theology" has no course to take here except to submit to the Received Teaching that the God-Man has entrusted to His true Church: that He rose again from the dead on the third day, which was actually the first Easter Sunday, some forty hours after He gave up His spirit on the wood of the Holy Cross to effect our redemption. You see, Joseph Ratzinger cannot insist that others submit to a Deposit of Faith which he himself does not believe has been "clarified" sufficiently to answer all objections to its traditional formulations. This is of the essence of Modernism.
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Ratzinger went on to write:
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From what has been said, it is clear that all Christian theology, if it is to be true to its origin, must be first and foremost a theology of the Resurrection. It must be a theology of the Resurrection before it is a theology of the justification of the sinner; it must be a theology of the Resurrection before it is a theology of the metaphysical Sonship of God. It can be a theology of the Cross but only as and within the framework of a theology of the Resurrection, its first and primordial statement in the good tidings that the power of death, the one constant of history has thus been imbued with an entirely new hope. In other words, the core of the gospel consists in the good tidings of the Resurrection and, consequently, in the good tidings of Gods action, which precedes all human doing. (p. 184)
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This is the old Modernist line, repeated constantly in Modernist-oriented "Scripture" courses (which I had to endure as a seminarian, believe me): that believers did not realize Our Lord was God until the Resurrection. Some Modernists contend that He did not know Who He was until the Resurrection. This is a lie. The Incarnation of Our Lord proves His Divine Sonship. at the essence of Catholic theology, the belief that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became Man in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb at the Annunciation precisely in order to redeem us on the wood of the Holy Cross to pay back the blood debt of Adam's sin, thus reopening the Gates of Heaven and destroying the power of sin and death forever. He Who is above all time entered time at the Incarnation, not at the Resurrection.
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Our Lord was worshiped as God by the Three Kings of the Orient at the Epiphany. Saint Peter confessed Him to be the Messiah in the region of Caeseria Philippi. Our Lord manifested the glory of His Sacred Divinity atop Mount Thabor to Saints Peter and the sons of Zebedee, James the Greater and John the Evangelist. He performed numerous miracles attesting to the fact that He is God. The Resurrection, while indeed a central truth of our Faith without which our Faith would be pointless, is the manifestation of Our Lord's victory over the power of sin and death. He had proclaimed Himself to be Who He is, God Incarnate, before His Crucifixion, before His Resurrection., which was an actual historical occurrence.
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The paragraph cited above is important also as it reflects Benedict/Ratzinger's views on the liturgy, developed in The Spirit of the Liturgy, that essence of the Mass is the Paschal Banquet, not the unbloody re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross. The Sacrifice of the Cross is secondary to the joy of the Resurrection, inverting the reality that there would no Resurrection if Our Lord had not paid back in His Sacred Humanity the blood debt of human sins that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God.
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After "developing" his thesis about the Resurrection, resolving yet another "thesis-antithesis" conflict, Ratzinger arrived at his conclusion, his own synthesis:
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The starting point is the fact that Israel awaited the awakening of the dead as the end of history, that is, quite literally as the the eschaton, as the final action of God. Using the stylistic devices of the apocalyptic writers, therefore, the Evangelists, and especially Matthew, described Christ's Cross and Resurrection as the final hour; they wanted it make it plain that this was not just any resurrection, such as Elias or some other miracle-worker might have brought about, but a resurrection of a kind never before known, after which death would be no more. That means also, then, that in this awakening the realm of history has been transcended, that he who arose from the dead did not return, as anyone else might have done, to a this-worldly-history but stands above it, though by no means without relationship to it. (p. 186)
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An interjection before the quotation proceeds. Our Lord did not resurrect to a "this-worldly history"? He arose with a glorified Body in time on Easter Sunday. This is de fide dogma of the Catholic Church. No so for Joseph Ratzinger, who says that the Resurrection was not the same sort of historical event as the Crucifixion, meaning that its exact time and nature is unknown:
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Thus the Resurrection cannot be a historical event in the same sense as the Crucifixion is. For that matter, there is no account that depicts it as such, nor is it circumscribed in time otherwise than by the eschatological symbolical expression "the third day." On the one hand, it belongs intrinsically to the totality and ultimate greatness of the event that is "eschatological", that is, that is transcends history; on the other hand, is belongs just as intrinsically to its inherent importance that it also touches upon history, that is, that this person who was dead is now no longer dead: he--really he himself and as such--is eternally alive in his individuality and uniqueness. Thus, it belongs, at the same time, to this event that it both reaches above history and is founded and anchored in history. Indeed, we could almost say that the definitive transformation that eschatology underwent by virtue of the Christian belief in the Resurrection is its transposition into history. For late Judaic expectation, expectation, eschatology lay at the end of history. To believe in the Resurrection of Jesus means, on the contrary, to believe in the eschaton in history, in the historicity of God's eschatological action.
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If what we have said thus far is correct, it is means that, as God's eschatological action, the Resurrection has both a cosmic and a future-oriented character and that the corresponding Christian faith is a faith of hope in the fullness of a promise that encompasses the whole cosmos. That means, in turn, a rejection of the individualization of man, the ordering of the "I" to the "we", the orientation of Christianity to the future as much as to the past. In less academic language, we might say: Christology is concerned not just with the freeing the individual qua individual from his sins in a way that can then only be described in a highly qualified manner; it is most deeply concerned with the future of man, which can be accomplished only as the future of the whole human race. It is concerned with the future of the whole human race, which can become itself only by rising above itself. . . . . And it means, certainly, that any theology is to be rejected as inadequate that confines salvation to a pure, nonobjectifiable subjectivity, when, in reality, it is precisely a liberation from isolation into subjectivity in the service of the whole. (pp. 186-188)
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Yes, we depend upon the eyewitness account of the Apostles concerning Our Lord's Resurrection. Are we, however, to consider them unreliable witnesses to the historical fact of the Resurrection of Our Lord on Easter Sunday? Did the Ascension actually take place forty days after Our Lord's Resurrection? No time in history is given? Who is Benedict/Ratzinger trying to kid? The time frame is there for all to see. Those who reject it reject Our Lord's Divine Revelation. They reject Him, in other words.
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Ratzinger's thoroughly Modernist propositions were condemned in Lamentabili Sane, issued by the Holy Office on July 3, 1907, and approved by Pope Saint Pius X:
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36. The Resurrection of the Savior is not properly a fact of the historical order. It is a fact of merely the supernatural order (neither demonstrated nor demonstrable) which the Christian conscience gradually derived from other facts.
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37. In the beginning, faith in the Resurrection of Christ was not so much in the fact itself of the Resurrection as in the immortal life of Christ with God.
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One must admire Ratzinger's boldness as he sets out for the belief of his readers propositions condemned by the Church as Modernist and thus contrary to the Received Teaching of the Divine Redeemer. What is not admirable is the refusal of those who, when confronted by these incontrovertible facts, start blaming the messenger for pointing them out rather than recognizing the author is an enemy of the Catholic Faith and thus an enemy of the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Blessed Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.
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Moreover, the "future of man" hinges on the state of individual souls, which must be in a state of Sanctifying Grace to be saved. The state of societies depends upon the state of souls. Pope Pius XI noted this very clearly in Divini Illius Magistri, December 30, 1929:
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Hence it is that in this proper object of her mission, that is, "in faith and morals, God Himself has made the Church sharer in the divine magisterium and, by a special privilege, granted her immunity from error; hence she is the mistress of men, supreme and absolutely sure, and she has inherent in herself an inviolable right to freedom in teaching.' By necessary consequence the Church is independent of any sort of earthly power as well in the origin as in the exercise of her mission as educator, not merely in regard to her proper end and object, but also in regard to the means necessary and suitable to attain that end. Hence with regard to every other kind of human learning and instruction, which is the common patrimony of individuals and society, the Church has an independent right to make use of it, and above all to decide what may help or harm Christian education. And this must be so, because the Church as a perfect society has an independent right to the means conducive to its end, and because every form of instruction, no less than every human action, has a necessary connection with man's last end, and therefore cannot be withdrawn from the dictates of the divine law, of which the Church is guardian, interpreter and infallible mistress.
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This truth is clearly set forth by Pius X of saintly memory:
"Whatever a Christian does even in the order of things of earth, he may not overlook the supernatural; indeed he must, according to the teaching of Christian wisdom, direct all things towards the supreme good as to his last end; all his actions, besides, in so far as good or evil in the order of morality, that is, in keeping or not with natural and divine law, fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church". . . .
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While treating of education, it is not out of place to show here how an ecclesiastical writer, who flourished in more recent times, during the Renaissance, the holy and learned Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to whom the cause of Christian education is greatly indebted, has set forth most clearly this well established point of Catholic doctrine. He had been a disciple of that wonderful educator of youth, St. Philip Neri; he was teacher and Latin secretary to St. Charles Borromeo, and it was at the latter's suggestion and under his inspiration that he wrote his splendid treatise on The Christian Education of Youth. In it he argues as follows:
"The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity."
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Pope Leo XIII noted the following Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:
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As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must necessarily tend to ruin if they go astray from "The Way." The Son of God, the Creator and Redeemer of mankind, is King and Lord of the earth, and holds supreme dominion over men, both individually and collectively. "And He gave Him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve Him" (Daniel vii., 14). "I am appointed King by Him . . . I will give Thee the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession" (Psalm ii., 6, 8). Therefore the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil thing for the common weal wherever Christianity does not hold the place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very end is lost sight of, for which, under God's providence, human society has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature. But when men's minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at.
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The state of the world depends upon the state of individual souls. The Church had a solicitude for the conversion of all men to the Faith prior to 1958 so that they could have the chance to save their immortal souls as Catholics and to thus contribute as good citizens to the building up of the common good in society in light of their own Particular Judgments. This is all inverted in the thought of the "new thinkers," who go so far as to believe that those steeped in Original Sin, such as the Jews, can be saved by a superseded covenant and without converting to the true Faith.
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Belief in the Resurrection? Not Necessary for the Jews
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For Joseph Ratzinger, you see, it is not necessary to seek the conversion of the Jews to the Catholic Church. They have a means of salvation that is perfectly valid, they have a "communio" of their own that has been ratified by the "reality" of their own situations.
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With then Cardinal Ratzinger's approval, the Pontifical Biblical Commission released a study in 2001, later published as a book,
The Hebrew People and its Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible, that said that the Jews were saved by the expectant waiting for the Messiah:
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"The verification of a discontinuity between the two Testaments and an overemphasis on the old perspectives should not lead to a one-sided spiritualization. That which was already fulfilled in Christ should still be fulfilled in us and in the world. The definitive fulfillment will be that [which takes place] at the end, with the resurrection of the dead, the new heaven and the new earth. The messianic hope of the Hebrews is not in vain. It can become for us a strong stimulus to keep alive the eschatological dimension of our faith. We also, like them [the Jews], are alive to the hope. The difference lies in the fact that for us He who will come will have the features of that Jesus who already came and is already present and active in us" (pp. 52-3)
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Atila Sinka Guimarães noted the following on this part of the text of The Hebrew People and its Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible:
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The fulfillment of the redemptive or messianic mission of Our Lord does not depend, contrary to what the PBC affirms, on our response to it and the events at the end of the world. The universal Redemption made by Our Lord was completed at the moment in which He expired on the cross and said: Consumatum est. Correspondence to grace and the individual salvation of each one of us are realities that exist as consequences of the Redemption. There is nothing confusing or complex about it. The second coming of Our Lord is different from His redemptive mission. Jesus Christ will come at the end of the world as judge in order to close History. Creation, Redemption, and the end of History are three distinct realities. This is the Catholic thinking on the matter. Therefore, the PBC's statement I quoted is wrong. And this error would be committed deliberately in order to favor the Jewish perfidy.
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Actually, this is much more than an attempt to favor the Jewish perfidy. No, this is part of parcel of Joseph Ratzinger's view that Our Lord's work depends upon our response to it, which is very much the theme of Principles of Catholic Theology and of the whole of his Modernist theology. Thus, Saint Vincent Ferrer was wrong to have converted thousands upon thousands of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. Alphonse Ratisbonne must have been imagining that Our Lady appeared to him as she did on the Miraculous Medal, thus effecting his conversion from Talmudic Judaism to the true Faith, Catholicism.
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Indeed, Benedict/Ratzinger bluntly denied in Principles of Catholic Theology that Our Lord meant to supersede the Old Covenant with the New and Eternal Covenant he inaugurated at the Last Supper and ratified by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.
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Jesus did not present his message as something totally new, as the end of all that had preceded it. He was and remained a Jew; that is, he linked his message to the tradition of believing Israel. He did not abandon the Old Testament as something antiquated and now superseded. He lived it and in doing so, revealed its meaning: his message was the creative referral of tradition to its original foundation. Traditions were criticized in order that genuine tradition might be revealed (p. 95).
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This passage is very important in the understanding of the convoluted, Modernist mind of the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. He is laying foundations of his own here for his contention that the Catholic Church has lost her "genuine" tradition and that it was right of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath to strip away those accretions that no longer made the Faith "relevant" to "modern" man. He is also saying in his own words, nineteen years before he approved the final text of The Hebrew People and its Scriptures in the Christian Bible, that the Old Covenant has not been superseded. This is heresy. It is a denial of dogmatic truth.
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Consider the words of Pope Eugene IV's Papal Bull Cantate Domino, issued during the Council of Florence, 1441:
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The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and teaches that the matter pertaining to the law of the Old Testament, of the Mosaic Law, which are divided into ceremonies, sacred rites, sacrifices, and sacraments, because they were established to signify something in the future, although they were suited to divine worship at that time, after our Lord's coming had been signified by them, ceased, and the sacraments of the New Testament began; and that whoever, even after the passion, placed hope in these matters of the law and submitted himself to them as necessary for salvation, as if faith in Christ could not save without them, sinned mortally. Yet it does not deny that after the passion of Christ up to the promulgation of the Gospel they could have been observed until they were believed to be in no way necessary for salvation; but after the promulgation of the Gospel it asserts that they cannot be observed without the loss of eternal salvation. All, therefore, who after that time (the promulgation of the Gospel) observe circumcision and the Sabbath and the other requirements of the law, it declares alien to the Christian faith and not in the least fit to participate in eternal salvation, unless someday they recover from these errors. . .
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It firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that those not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart "into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels" [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock; and that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the sacraments of the Church of benefit for salvation, and do fastings, almsgiving, and other functions of piety and exercises of Christian service produce eternal reward, and that no one, whatever almsgiving he has practiced, even if he has shed blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he has remained in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church.
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Must a Catholic believe this dogmatic pronouncement? Is a Catholic free to ignore or to reject it because it has "outlived" its usefulness or, worse yet, was never even truly valid? Has the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate repealed this? Can the opinion of a Modernist theologian do away with this firm statement of truth, which beings by stating that the "Holy roman Church firmly believes, professes and teaches. . ."?
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Indeed, was the aforementioned Alphonse Ratisbonne wrong to have converted? Would his soul have been saved had he not converted from Talmudic Judaism. He certainly did not think so:
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"I had come out of a dark pit, out of a tomb...and I was alive, completely alive. I thought of my brother Theodore with inexpressible joy. But how I wept as I thought of my family, of my fiancee, of my poor sisters. I wept indeed, as I thought of them whom I so loved and for whom I said the first of my prayers. Will you not raise your eyes to the Savior shoe blood blots out original sin? Oh! How hideous is the mark of this taint, and how does it alter beyond recognition the creature made in God's own likeness!"
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When priests wanted to delay his Baptism for a time, Alphonse Ratisbonne said:
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"The Jews who heard the preaching of the Apostles were baptized immediately, and you want to put me off, after I have 'heard' the preaching of the Queen of the Apostles?"
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As is recounted in Mary's Miraculous Medal:
News of this miraculous event spread quickly all over Europe, especially in diplomatic and financial circles, when Ratisbonne, de Bassierers and de La Ferronays were widely known. The city of Rome itself was in a stir and a special Church commission was established to study the astonishing conversion. Faced with the overpowering evidence, the court fully recognized the signal miracle wrought by God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the spontaneous conversion of Marie Alphonse Ratisbonne from Judaism to Catholicism. It was a major triumph of the Miraculous Medal.
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Alphonse Ratisbonne became a Catholic priest, serving in the Holy Land.
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So great was the love he had for his people, that he dedicated the remainder of his life, as did his brother, Father Theodore, to work for the conversion of their immortal souls. Among the converts of these two priest brothers were a total of twenty-eight members of their own family.
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A misplaced zeal for souls that belongs to another era in Church history? Or the model that everyone, including Benedict XVI, must follow, yes, even with the Jews and Mohammedans?
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The Reason for Deconstructing Truth: Ecumenism and the One-World Religion
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Alas, Joseph Ratzinger and the rest of the "new thinkers," including De Lubac, believe that they ignore whatever it is they wish while they contend that they are not ignoring anything. Ratzinger praised De Lubac for actually discovering a new meaning of the word Catholic:
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De Lubac, for his part, is convinced that Christianity is, by its very nature, a mystery of union. The essence of original sin is the split into individuality, which knows only itself. The essence of redemption is the mending of the shattered image of God, the union of the human race through and in the One who stands for all and in whom, as Paul says (Gal 3: 28), all are one: Jesus Christ. On this premise, the world Catholic became for de Lubac the main theme of all his theological speculation: to be a Christian means to be a Catholic, means to be on one's way to an all-embracing unity Union is redemption, for it is the realization of our likeness to God, the Three-in-One. But union with him is, accordingly, inseparable from and a consequence of our own unity. The concentration on what is Catholic, which seems at first glance to be directed inward, thus is revealed in its original impulse to be an emphatic orientation toward those today who are searching: only when the most inward aspect of Christianity is proclaimed and lived does it reveal itself as both the answer to and a force equivalent to the dynamism of atheism--that that humanism that seeks the unification of mankind. Only when we see this clearly can we rightly understand the purpose of Vatican Council II, which in all its comments about the Church, was moving in the direction of de Lubac's thought." (pp. 49-50)
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In other words, formal membership in the Catholic Church for De Lubac was not a precondition to being called a Catholic. To be a "Christian means to be a Catholic, means to be on one's way to an all-embracing unity." What is De Lubac saying? Quite simply, this: the "Church" has not achieved unity. All Christians, if they desire "redemption," must be on the search for this unity. This denies the teaching of the Catholic Chuch that she is one and that she is indivisible. Once again, although couched in ambiguity and artful tones, is a slap in the fact to the Received Teaching of the Divine Redeemer.
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Pope Leo XIII stated the following truth about the unity of the Catholic Church in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896:
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He who seeks the truth must be guided by these fundamental principles. That is to say, that Christ the Lord instituted and formed the Church: wherefore when we are asked what its nature is, the main thing is to see what Christ wished and what in fact He did. Judged by such a criterion it is the unity of the Church which must be principally considered; and of this, for the general good, it has seemed useful to speak in this Encyclical.
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It is so evident from the clear and frequent testimonies of Holy Writ that the true Church of Jesus Christ is one, that no Christian can dare to deny it. But in judging and determining the nature of this unity many have erred in various ways. Not the foundation of the Church alone, but its whole constitution, belongs to the class of things effected by Christ's free choice. For this reason the entire case must be judged by what was actually done. We must consequently investigate not how the Church may possibly be one, but how He, who founded it, willed that it should be one. But when we consider what was actually done we find that Jesus Christ did not, in point of fact, institute a Church to embrace several communities similar in nature, but in themselves distinct, and lacking those bonds which render the Church unique and indivisible after that manner in which in the symbol of our faith we profess: "I believe in one Church." "The Church in respect of its unity belongs to the category of things indivisible by nature, though heretics try to divide it into many parts...We say, therefore, that the Catholic Church is unique in its essence, in its doctrine, in its origin, and in its excellence...Furthermore, the eminence of the Church arises from its unity, as the principle of its constitution - a unity surpassing all else, and having nothing like unto it or equal to it" (S. Clemens Alexandrinus, Stronmatum lib. viii., c. 17). For this reason Christ, speaking of the mystical edifice, mentions only one Church, which he calls His own - "I will build my church; " any other Church except this one, since it has not been founded by Christ, cannot be the true Church. This becomes even more evident when the purpose of the Divine Founder is considered. For what did Christ, the Lord, ask? What did He wish in regard to the Church founded, or about to be founded? This: to transmit to it the same mission and the same mandate which He had received from the Father, that they should be perpetuated. This He clearly resolved to do: this He actually did. "As the Father hath sent me, I also send you" (John xx., 21). "Ad thou hast sent Me into the world I also have sent them into the world" (John xvii., 18).
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But the mission of Christ is to save that which had perished: that is to say, not some nations or peoples, but the whole human race, without distinction of time or place. "The Son of Man came that the world might be saved by Him" (John iii., 17). "For there is no other name under Heaven given to men whereby we must be saved" (Acts iv., 12). The Church, therefore, is bound to communicate without stint to all men, and to transmit through all ages, the salvation effected by Jesus Christ, and the blessings flowing there from. Wherefore, by the will of its Founder, it is necessary that this Church should be one in all lands and at all times. to justify the existence of more than one Church it would be necessary to go outside this world, and to create a new and unheard - of race of men.
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That the one Church should embrace all men everywhere and at all times was seen and foretold by Isaias, when looking into the future he saw the appearance of a mountain conspicuous by its all surpassing altitude, which set forth the image of "The House of the Lord" - that is, of the Church, "And in the last days the mountain of the House of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of the mountains" (Isa. ii., 2).
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But this mountain which towers over all other mountains is one; and the House of the Lord to which all nations shall come to seek the rule of living is also one. "And all nations shall flow into it. And many people shall go, and say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the House of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths" (Ibid., ii., 2-3).
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Explaining this passage, Optatus of Milevis says: "It is written in the prophet Isaias: 'from Sion the law shall go forth and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.' For it is not on Mount Sion that Isaias sees the valley, but on the holy mountain, that is, the Church, which has raised itself conspicuously throughout the entire Roman world under the whole heavens....The Church is, therefore, the spiritual Sion in which Christ has been constituted King by God the Father, and which exists throughout the entire earth, on which there is but one Catholic Church" (De Schism. Donatist., lib. iii., n. 2). And Augustine says: "What can be so manifest as a mountain, or so well known? There are, it is true, mountains which are unknown because they are situated in some remote part of the earth But this mountain is not unknown; for it has filled the whole face of the world, and about this it is said that it is prepared on the summit of the mountains" (In Ep. Joan., tract i., n. 13).
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Furthermore, the Son of God decreed that the Church should be His mystical body, with which He should be united as the Head, after the manner of the human body which He assumed, to which the natural head is physiologically united. As He took to Himself a mortal body, which He gave to suffering and death in order to pay the price of man's redemption, so also He has one mystical body in which and through which He renders men partakers of holiness and of eternal salvation. God "hath made Him (Christ) head over all the Church, which is His body" (Eph. i., 22-23). Scattered and separated members cannot possibly cohere with the head so as to make one body. But St. Paul says: "All members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ" (I Cor. xii., 12). Wherefore this mystical body, he declares, is "compacted and fitly jointed together. The head, Christ: from whom the whole body, being compacted and fitly jointed together, by what every joint supplieth according to the operation in the measure of every part" (Eph. iv., 15-16). And so dispersed members, separated one from the other, cannot be united with one and the same head. "There is one God, and one Christ; and His Church is one and the faith is one; and one the people, joined together in the solid unity of the body in the bond of concord. This unity cannot be broken, nor the one body divided by the separation of its constituent parts" (S. Cyprianus, De Cath. Eccl. Unitateccl. Unitate, n. 23). And to set forth more clearly the unity of the Church, he makes use of the illustration of a living body, the members of which cannot possibly live unless united to the head and drawing from it their vital force. Separated from the head they must of necessity die. "The Church," he says, "cannot be divided into parts by the separation and cutting asunder of its members. What is cut away from the mother cannot live or breathe apart" (Ibid.). What similarity is there between a dead and a living body? "For no man ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, as also Christ doth the Church: because we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones" (Eph. v., 29-30).
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Benedict/Ratzinger believes that the Church has been divided and that the "search for unity" will produce unexpected results in the years ahead, denying the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church from Saint Peter through Pope Pius XII that she has a Divine mandate to seek the conversion of all men in all places and at all times until the end of time to her maternal bosom. Ratzinger's nebulous nature of how this "union" of the "divided" church will come about is expressed very clearly in Principles of Catholic Theology:
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Rightly understood, it can be said without reservation that we are again in need of pioneers of the future--but it is not just by doing something different that one becomes a pioneer; it is by doing what is meaningful and right, a constitutive element of which is an innermost oneness with the universal Church as she is revealed in her fundamental traditions.
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We cannot say today where these pioneers will appear--pioneers, not of a unity that is arbitrarily manipulated and by that fact doomed to failure, but of a unity that touches upon these most interior depths of faith in which the true call of the Lord becomes audible to both sides. We cannot say what paths they must travel in order to make new unities possible. We can only say that they will achieve their goal, not by migration and destruction, but by a deeper penetration into the truth of Jesus Christ. We can say also that it is not by ordinance but by the ardor of a love that springs from faith that they will that effectiveness that, if God so wills, will in its turn lead to new ordinances, decrees and instructions. To make a reality of "local ecumenism" means, therefore, to work in the spirit of pioneers for the unity of faith and to hope that God will send it when he knows that is hour is come. (p. 311)
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This is a manifest denial of the nature of the Catholic Church, founded in the belief that the "Church" is divided and must trust that God will somehow provide the means to unite her once again. We do not as yet understand the full truth of Jesus Christ, which is why "dialogue" without "migration," that is without an insistence that Protestants or the Orthodox convert to the Catholic Church, and without destruction, meaning without the loss of the "identity" of heretical and/or schismatic sects that sprang from the devil himself, all to the great harm of the salvation of the souls of men and thus to the common good of nations. And what is to emerge from Benedict/Ratzinger's proposed "deeper penetration into the truth of Jesus Christ?" Why, of course, the one-world religion, prophesied by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, as the logical consequence of the Sillon, whose philosophy has become the guiding force of conciliarism.
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Pope Saint Pius X noted the following in Notre Charge Apostolique about the Sillon, comments that are just as applicable to the Sillon's offspring, conciliarism:
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And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon? Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer.
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One of the fundamental "building stones" of Benedict's ecumenical perspectives is his belief that there is a distinction to be made between the pre-Chalcedonian and post-Chalcedonian life of the Catholic Church. Accepting the essential thesis of the Orthodox and thus of most Protestants, Ratzinger believes that the Church of the Middle Ages did not reflect what God had in mind for the Church, that it is in the age of the Fathers that we see realized the archetype of the Church that holds out the best promise for the "model" of a Christian "unity" he contends is lacking in the "divided" Church of today:
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Anyone who wants to make a prognosis for the future of ecumenism must first clarify what he understands by ecumenism, that is, how he sees the division of Christianity and what model of unity he has in mind. It seems to me that, among the incalculable number of divisions by which Christianity is torn, there are two basic types to which two different models of unity correspond. We encounter the first type in the division in the ancient Church between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches; it is also typical of the the split between East and West, although ecclesial difference of a hitherto unknown radicality played a role there. We encounter the second type in the divisions that have been formed in the wake of the reform movements of the sixteenth century. (p. 193)
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Leaving aside the little matter that the "reform movements" were violent, bloody revolutions against the Divine plan that God Himself had directly, immediately and personally instituted for man's return to Himself through the Catholic Church, Benedict/Ratzinger's belief in the non-contiuum of the life and praxis of the Church is refuted definitively as one of the fundamental errors of false ecumenism analyzed by Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928:
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And here it seems opportune to expound and to refute a certain false opinion, on which this whole question, as well as that complex movement by which non-Catholics seek to bring about the union of the Christian churches depends. For authors who favor this view are accustomed, times almost without number, to bring forward these words of Christ: "That they all may be one.... And there shall be one fold and one shepherd,"[14] with this signification however: that Christ Jesus merely expressed a desire and prayer, which still lacks its fulfillment. For they are of the opinion that the unity of faith and government, which is a note of the one true Church of Christ, has hardly up to the present time existed, and does not to-day exist. They consider that this unity may indeed be desired and that it may even be one day attained through the instrumentality of wills directed to a common end, but that meanwhile it can only be regarded as mere ideal. They add that the Church in itself, or of its nature, is divided into sections; that is to say, that it is made up of several churches or distinct communities, which still remain separate, and although having certain articles of doctrine in common, nevertheless disagree concerning the remainder; that these all enjoy the same rights; and that the Church was one and unique from, at the most, the apostolic age until the first Ecumenical Councils. Controversies therefore, they say, and longstanding differences of opinion which keep asunder till the present day the members of the Christian family, must be entirely put aside, and from the remaining doctrines a common form of faith drawn up and proposed for belief, and in the profession of which all may not only know but feel that they are brothers. The manifold churches or communities, if united in some kind of universal federation, would then be in a position to oppose strongly and with success the progress of irreligion. This, Venerable Brethren, is what is commonly said. There are some, indeed, who recognize and affirm that Protestantism, as they call it, has rejected, with a great lack of consideration, certain articles of faith and some external ceremonies, which are, in fact, pleasing and useful, and which the Roman Church still retains. They soon, however, go on to say that that Church also has erred, and corrupted the original religion by adding and proposing for belief certain doctrines which are not only alien to the Gospel, but even repugnant to it. Among the chief of these they number that which concerns the primacy of jurisdiction, which was granted to Peter and to his successors in the See of Rome. Among them there indeed are some, though few, who grant to the Roman Pontiff a primacy of honor or even a certain jurisdiction or power, but this, however, they consider not to arise from the divine law but from the consent of the faithful. Others again, even go so far as to wish the Pontiff Himself to preside over their motley, so to say, assemblies. But, all the same, although many non-Catholics may be found who loudly preach fraternal communion in Christ Jesus, yet you will find none at all to whom it ever occurs to submit to and obey the Vicar of Jesus Christ either in His capacity as a teacher or as a governor. Meanwhile they affirm that they would willingly treat with the Church of Rome, but on equal terms, that is as equals with an equal: but even if they could so act. it does not seem open to doubt that any pact into which they might enter would not compel them to turn from those opinions which are still the reason why they err and stray from the one fold of Christ.
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This reiteration of Catholic teaching, given by Pope Pius XI in a very accurate assessment of the ideology of ecumenism This passage is a stunning and total contradiction of Benedict/Ratzinger's Hegelian musings on ecumenism in Principles of Catholic Theology, musings he himself helped to insert into the very life of the conciliar church as a Vatican II peritus and which he has been fomenting in official capacities (bishop, cardinal, curial official,. pope) since that time. It is no accident that Joseph Ratzinger ignores as unworthy of comment this condemnation. He believes he can ignore the perennial teaching of the Church with impunity, and how sad it is that there are even traditional Catholics who are unwilling to admit, at least publicly, the central fact that Joseph Ratzinger has heretical views on the unicity of the Catholic Church and on his rejection of seeking the absolute, unconditional return of those outside of her bosom by their full and complete assent to the Deposit of the Faith that God Himself entrusted to her.
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Benedict's thoroughly anti-Catholic view of the Church and those who are separated from her are on full display throughout Principles of Catholic Theology, as they have been throughout his pontificate these past sixteen months. Just a few additional excerpts will suffice for present purpose to reiterate this point, which has been made many times on this site.
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After stating that Lutheran Augsburg Confession contains some of the elements for a "solution" to the "division" in the Church. Ratzinger noted the following:
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The question of the practical possibility of such a development--the prognosis on the basis of the diagnosis--is much more difficult than it was with regard to a rapprochement between the Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. This, too, is a question that can be answered better by action than by speculation. What action? Generally speaking, certainly, a manner of thinking and acting that respects the other in his search for the true essence of Christianity: an attitude that regards unity as an urgent good that demands sacrifice, whereas separation demands justification in every single instance. But we can define the required action even more clearly in terms of the above diagnosis. It means that the Catholic does not insist on the dissolution of the Protestant confessions and the demolishing of their churches but hopes, rather, that they will be strengthened in their confessions and in their ecclesial reality. There is, of course, a confessionalism that divides and that must be overcome: on whatever side it occurs, we must speak of confessionalism in a pejorative sense wherever the noncontinual, the anti-, is experience in an essential constituent and thus intensifies the division. We must oppose to this confessionalism of separation a hermeneutics of union that sees the confession of faith as that which unites. Our interest, that is, the interest of ecumenism, cannot be linked to the precondition that the confession will simply disappear but rather that it will be translated from its banishment to the reality of the nonbinding into the full meaning of a binding community of faith in the Church. For only where this happens is a mutually binding community possible:" only thus does an ecumenism of faith possess the necessary stability. (p. 202)
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In other words, the Hegelian dialectic, which Ratzinger outlined in a seemingly dispassionate, disinterested tone at the beginning of Principles of Catholic Theology, is indeed what will produce "unity" in the Church, separating the "essential" from the "non-essential," the accepting the "reality" of the various "Christian denominations," if you will, as something willed by God, Who desires "Christians" to seek a unity that does not threaten their individual identities and "traditions." This is, of course, completely heretical. There is no such thing as a "search for the true essence of Christianity." Such an assertion implies that it is possible to jettison truths defined by Holy Mother Church under the infallible guidance of the Holy Ghost in order to effect a "unity of brotherhood" that has more to do with membership in a Masonic lodge than it is has with fidelity to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ revealed and entrusted solely to to the Catholic Church.
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As noted above, the Catholic Church is of herself the one sole Christian Church of God. Those who profess Faith in the Name of the Divine Redeemer but who are outside of her maternal bosom do not belong to "churches." They belong to sects. Indeed, this very point was to made to me back in 1993 by a European monsignor who worked in a Vatican dicastery. Responding to my criticism of a section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that used the word "churches" to refer to Protestant denominations, the monsignor said, "There are not Protestant churches. There are only sects. There are no churches outside of the Catholic Church." I am told that he went back to his own country, which shall remain nameless here, to serve as a pastor of souls rather than to participate in the deconstruction of the Faith.
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Additionally, there is no such thing as a distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" truths, implying that elements of the Deposit of Faith are negotiable. Obviously, Benedict/Ratzinger really believes in such a false distinction. He is more than ready to sacrifice the principle of the absolute primacy of the See of Peter and the defined dogma of Purgatory to effect a false union with the Orthodox. He is more than ready to do the same with the inheritors of the Orthodox view of the Faith, Protestants.
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Sadly for Joseph Ratzinger, however, his view of a "distinction" among truths has been condemned repeatedly by the Church's official magisterium, including this telling passage from Pope Pius XI's Mortalium Animos, issued on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1928:
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These pan-Christians who turn their minds to uniting the churches seem, indeed, to pursue the noblest of ideas in promoting charity among all Christians: nevertheless how does it happen that this charity tends to injure faith? Everyone knows that John himself, the Apostle of love, who seems to reveal in his Gospel the secrets of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and who never ceased to impress on the memories of his followers the new commandment "Love one another," altogether forbade any intercourse with those who professed a mutilated and corrupt version of Christ's teaching: "If any man come to you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house nor say to him: God speed you." For which reason, since charity is based on a complete and sincere faith, the disciples of Christ must be united principally by the bond of one faith. Who then can conceive a Christian Federation, the members of which retain each his own opinions and private judgment, even in matters which concern the object of faith, even though they be repugnant to the opinions of the rest? And in what manner, We ask, can men who follow contrary opinions, belong to one and the same Federation of the faithful? For example, those who affirm, and those who deny that sacred Tradition is a true fount of divine Revelation; those who hold that an ecclesiastical hierarchy, made up of bishops, priests and ministers, has been divinely constituted, and those who assert that it has been brought in little by little in accordance with the conditions of the time; those who adore Christ really present in the Most Holy Eucharist through that marvelous conversion of the bread and wine, which is called transubstantiation, and those who affirm that Christ is present only by faith or by the signification and virtue of the Sacrament; those who in the Eucharist recognize the nature both of a sacrament and of a sacrifice, and those who say that it is nothing more than the memorial or commemoration of the Lord's Supper; those who believe it to be good and useful to invoke by prayer the Saints reigning with Christ, especially Mary the Mother of God, and to venerate their images, and those who urge that such a veneration is not to be made use of, for it is contrary to the honor due to Jesus Christ, "the one mediator of God and men." How so great a variety of opinions can make the way clear to effect the unity of the Church We know not; that unity can only arise from one teaching authority, one law of belief and one faith of Christians. But We do know that from this it is an easy step to the neglect of religion or indifferentism and to modernism, as they call it. Those, who are unhappily infected with these errors, hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute but relative, that is, it agrees with the varying necessities of time and place and with the varying tendencies of the mind, since it is not contained in immutable revelation, but is capable of being accommodated to human life. Besides this, in connection with things which must be believed, it is nowise licit to use that distinction which some have seen fit to introduce between those articles of faith which are fundamental and those which are not fundamental, as they say, as if the former are to be accepted by all, while the latter may be left to the free assent of the faithful: for the supernatural virtue of faith has a formal cause, namely the authority of God revealing, and this is patient of no such distinction. For this reason it is that all who are truly Christ's believe, for example, the Conception of the Mother of God without stain of original sin with the same faith as they believe the mystery of the August Trinity, and the Incarnation of our Lord just as they do the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, according to the sense in which it was defined by the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. Are these truths not equally certain, or not equally to be believed, because the Church has solemnly sanctioned and defined them, some in one age and some in another, even in those times immediately before our own? Has not God revealed them all? For the teaching authority of the Church, which in the divine wisdom was constituted on earth in order that revealed doctrines might remain intact for ever, and that they might be brought with ease and security to the knowledge of men, and which is daily exercised through the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops who are in communion with him, has also the office of defining, when it sees fit, any truth with solemn rites and decrees, whenever this is necessary either to oppose the errors or the attacks of heretics, or more clearly and in greater detail to stamp the minds of the faithful with the articles of sacred doctrine which have been explained. But in the use of this extraordinary teaching authority no newly invented matter is brought in, nor is anything new added to the number of those truths which are at least implicitly contained in the deposit of Revelation, divinely handed down to the Church: only those which are made clear which perhaps may still seem obscure to some, or that which some have previously called into question is declared to be of faith.
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Pope Pius XI did not invent anything in Mortalium Animos, which is not simply an "outdated" pastoral approach. The italicized section in the passage above states a truth about the Deposit of Faith from which no Catholic may dissent legitimately or put into doubt in the slightest. The thought of Joseph Ratzinger and of other like-minded conciliarists is condemned without qualification here. Those who have the eyes to see this and to recognize it must take heed of the fact that there is a wolf in shepherd's clothing living in the Apostolic Palace in the State of Vatican City.
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Rejecting that those outside of the Catholic Church must return to her bosom, Benedict/Ratzinger wrote the following in Principles of Catholic Theology:
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The question about the prognosis for ecumenism is, ultimately, a question about the forces that operative in Christianity today and that may be expected to leaven their mark on the future. Two obstacles are opposed to the realization of Church unity: one the one hand, a confessional chauvinism that orients itself primarily, not according to truth, but according to custom and, in its obsession with what is its own, puts emphasis primarily on what is directed against others. On the other hand, an indifferentism with regard to faith that sees the question of truth as an obstacle, measure unity by expediency and thus turns into an external pact that bears always within itself the seeds of new divisions The guarantee of unity is a Christianity of faith and fidelity that lives the faith as a decision with a definite content but precisely for that reason is always searching for unity, let itself be constantly purified and deepened as a preparation for it and, in so doing, helps the other to recognize the common center and to find himself there by the same process of purification and deepening. It is clear that the first two attitudes are closer and more immediate to man than the third, which challenges him to excel himself and, at the same time, reduces him to utter helplessness, demanding from him, inexhaustible patience and a readiness to be constantly purified and deepened anew. But Christianity, as a whole, rests on the victory of the improbable, on the impulse of the Holy Spirit, who leads man beyond himself and precisely in this way brings him to himself. Because we have confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit, we hope also for the unity of the Church and dedicate ourselves to an ecumenism of faith. (p. 203(
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Once again, Ratzinger contends that unity of the Church is lacking, seeing the "Church" as larger than the Roman Catholic Church, terming heretical and/or schismatic sects as parts of "Christianity" when in fact they are tools of the devil to keep people outside of the bosom of the sure means of salvation, the Catholic Church. This is why is it is necessary, as will demonstrated below, to redefine Tradition by a false appeal to the Fathers of the Church, who lived at a time of ecclesial "purity" that must be recaptured and holds the potential for "ecumenical progress" today.
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Contrast, please, Benedict/Ratzinger's words above with those Pope Pius IX in Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868, an Apostolic Letter addressed specifically to Protestants prior to the First Vatican Council in order to admonish them to follow the only path that God has marked out for their salvation, a return to the Catholic Church:
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Sustained therefore by this hope, solicitous and urged by the charity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who offered His life for the salvation of all the race of men, it is not possible for us to pass by the occasion of the future Council without turning Our paternal and Apostolic word again to all those who, even if they acknowledge Jesus Christ the Redeemer and boast of the name of Christian, do not profess the totality of the true faith of Christ and are not in the communion of the Catholic Church. This being the case, we propose with all zeal and Charity to admonish, exhort, and beseech them for this reason to seriously consider and reflect whether the way in which they continue is that which is indicated by that same Christ the Lord: which is the way that leads to eternal life.
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Nobody will certainly be able to doubt or deny that this Jesus Christ, to the end that the fruits of His Redemption might be applied to all the race of men, has built here on earth, upon Peter, the only Church, which is one, holy, catholic and apostolic; and that He has conferred upon her the power necessary to preserve whole and inviolate the deposit of faith; to transmit this same faith to all peoples, tribes, and nations; to call [elect] to unity in this Mystical Body, through baptism, all men, for the purpose of preserving in them, and perfecting, that new life of grace, without which no one can merit and obtain eternal life; wherefore this Church, which constitutes the Mystical Body, will persist and prosper in her own stable and indefectible nature until the end of the ages, and offer to all Her sons the means of salvation.
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Whoever thus gives proper attention and reflection to the situation which surrounds the various religious societies, divided amongst themselves and separated from the Catholic Church - which, without interruption, from the time of Christ the Lord and of His Apostles, by means of her legitimate sacred Shepherds, has always exercised, and exercises still, the divine power conferred upon Her by the Lord - it will be easy to convi
