Jesus, the New Covenant Priesthood, and the Most Holy Eucharist-UPDATED Link Fixed!

[Originally posted May of 08]

Over the weekend I listened to Dr. Brant Pitre (a Catholic version of N. T. Wright) discussing the above topic. I think it is very powerful and contains some arguments that any self-respecting Protester needs to answer. And if no answer is forthcoming, then, said self-respecting Protester ought to either quit the protesting, or quit the self-respecting!

Part 1.

Part 2

Religious Freedom and the Catholic Church

From the Remnant…

http://remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2008-1115-religious_freedom_and_the_cathol.htm

Here is a tease…

Religious Freedom has certainly been one of those hotly debated topics in the Church before, during and after Vatican II. What are the true immutable principles involved and are these to be applied univocally or analogically according to a diversity of concrete circumstances and historical contexts?  Is the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Freedom, “Dignitatis Humanae”, an expression of  “continuity” or “rupture” from these immutable principles?  Pope Benedict XVI wished to settle this question in his Address to the Roman Curia on the “Hermeneutic of Continuity” (December 22, 2005): “It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.”

This work by Bishop von Ketteler, published approximately 100 years before Vatican II, sheds much light on these burning questions and helps us to grasp more firmly what “is easy to miss…at a first glance.” Ketteler clearly establishes the unchanging principles involved and goes further by demonstrating how these are to be properly applied given the circumstances and requirements of our age while dispelling confusion and reconciling apparent contradictions in light of historical contingencies.

The choice…

Poll!

Biden says Obama a national security liability.

Well, not exactly in those words… but that is what he conveyed to a group of donors in Seattle, WA. (former home of the Supersonics…) He said the following: [with my comments in brackets]

“28 states are in serious trouble and they’re about to contribute to the economic downward spiral because what are they doing? Cutting services, laying people off as they lose their tax base. So there are going to be a lot of tough decisions Barack’s gonna have to make, a lot of tough decisions, including on foreign policy. [and here is the kicker folks!!!!!]
“And here’s the point I want to make. Mark my words. Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis [a generated crisis, one concocted to test Obama], to test the mettle of this guy. And he’s gonna have to make some really tough – I don’t know what the decision’s gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee [he guarantees!!] you it’s gonna happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you, not financially to help him, we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right. Because all these decisions, all these decisions, once they’re made if they work, then they weren’t viewed as a crisis. If they don’t work, it’s viewed as you didn’t make the right decision, a little bit like how we hesitated so long dealing with Bosnia and dealing with Kosovo, and consequently 200,000 people lost their lives that maybe didn’t have to lose lives. It’s how we made a mistake in Iraq. We made a mistake in Somalia. So there’s gonna be some tough decisions. They may emanate from the Middle East. They may emanate from the sub-continent. They may emanate from Russia’s newly-emboldened position because they’re floating in a sea of oil.”

Well, if I was thinking about voting for Obama, I just got a really good reason from his running mate to vote for McCain. This is too good to make up, folks. You just can’t make this stuff up. Why in the world when Foreign policy is his weakest point and the economy (his best position in terms of popularity) is currently the talk, why would you switch to the opponents best point? Biden is the best player on McCain’s team!! What a dope. Obama has to be kicking himself wishing he had swallowed his pride and got Hilary on the ticket. The most he would’ve had to worry about if she were VP candidate would be a food taster… now this guy could cost him the election. Funny funny funny.

Polling data…

One ought to be careful about polling data. Campaigns have their own “internal” polling which is much more accurate than what we are “allowed” to see. Folks with access to that “internal” data say that the race is much closer than we are allowed to think. This is verified by the way the campaigns act. If the data we are force fed is accurate, McCain is really just wasting money and Obama shouldn’t be on the attack. But McCain is still fighting and Obama is not playing a defensive strategy that is designed to “run out the clock.” The Obama campaign knows that the numbers are much closer than the public sees. This is why he is urging his supporters to remember what happened in New Hampshire, when on the day of the primary, polling had him up by 10% points and he lost. It is also why he has gone on the attack about “Joe the Plumber.” He gave the worst answer he could have there, but if it was in the bag, as the media/Obama surrogates have told us, then why trash the guy and dig up so much about him, so that we can now safely say that we know more about Joe than we do Barak Obama?
The point is this: let’s wait to see what the numbers look like from Zogby the day of the election. Zogby has nailed it in the tight races like no one else has over the last 12-16 years, at least since I have been really paying attention starting in 92, though I didn’t hear about Zogby until I believe 96. Check out his site as the day nears. If he has an Obama win, then chances are that Obama will win… but if it is in the margin of error or they are tied, then there is a good chance for McCain, and if he has McCain ahead then it is in the bag for McCain.

More about elections, polling, Obama, abortion and FOCA next time when I issue the second installment of “Abortion and the Obama Factor.”

Pax

Obama is gonna lose… Part 2

Well, maybe not.

He just might be too pretty, too smooth and too sexy.  (??)

McCain too old, too experienced, too injured, too unsexy.

I often get upset when Democrats treat Americans as if they are sooo stupid and they (the dems) need to run your life for you because you are just too damn dumb.  But I think they are right that Americans are dumb.  But not in the way they think.  They are smart enough to run their everyday lives (well, for the most part)… but the anti-intellectualism that exists in our society, the need for grandeur, the drive for instant gratification, etc. plays to Obama; and here is the contradiction.  Obama is supposed to be an intellectual and (God help us if we hear this much more) nuanced.  Make me sick.  If umm-ing your way through an answer in nuanced, then I am a fricking genius.  Anyway, we can’t stay focussed for 2 minutes to hear even a ridiculously idiotic answer to a question, and we are anti-intellectual, but then we feel good somehow (maybe making peace with our anti-intellectualism) voting for the guy who is nuanced?  Whatever.

McCain on the Offence

Finally, McCain has realized (it seems) that being a Mr. Nice Guy who tries to get the moderate vote is not the best way.  He is attacking Obama and hard… FINALLY!  Palin is out there kicking butt, and taking no prisoners.  There is nooo way that McCain will win if he doesn’t attack.  I really don’t like McCain (odd for a traditionalist right… or not), but the New Messiah is just unbearable.

What is the Pope saying? *UPDATED*

**UPDATE**  Rorate has an update on the Popes remarks.  Much better… but still……

 

Well, over at the New Liturgical Movement there is a post (“An Act of Tolerance”) on the Pope’s comments about the TLM and the MP to the French people via the media in a short press conference.

I am a little confused by his comments.  Cardinal Hoyos seems to be making, for the Pope, much more liberalizing comments than the Pope is making himself.  I can see now the uncooperative bishops who flatly defy the Pope to his face on this thing now confidently quoting the Pope.  “You see?” they will say, “the MP is meant only for the Old Farts and the damn SSPX schimatics!”  And I can see that from the remarks of the Pope.

Next, what is this business about fundamental identity?  Is he using the word identity technically- probably not… the press wouldn’t get it.  But maybe he is… I don’t know.  And without knowing I can only guess at the probable meanings.  Interpreted broadly, it could just mean that the two mass are both valid and therefore have a fundamental identity.  But every valid rite could have that said of it and then it would be superfluous at best to say that… then again, the obvious often needs to be stated.  But still, that doesn’t make sense here.  He can’t mean (or can he?) that the two masses are identical, strictly speaking.  That is obviously untrue.  But add “fundamental” to the mix and now I am really confused.  What does fundamental mean?  Back to the first option?  No, that is not satsfactory.  But what is?  The fact seems to be that the is a fundamental non-identity between the two forms, or rites or whatever they are supposed to be called now.

What is interesting to me is that in his valiant effort to promote the Hermeneutic of Continuity, he is actually using a Hermeneutic of Discontinuity.  The very intent of the authors of the New Mass was a break with the past.  One of the framers even gloated that the Old Roman Rite had been destroyed when replaced by the New which was conceived (at least in part) to make the liturgy more compatible with protestant worship.  Of course, the approval of the Lutheran “bishops” verified that!  To try and make a rite that was intended to be a break with the past continuous with that past is in discontinuity with the past 40 years.  He did write the preface to Gamber’s book didn’t he?  He was a friend of Machael Davies wasn’t he?  I am sure he knows Davies’ monumental trilogy, doesn’t he?  Not to mention V2 called for a renewal or revision (not unheard of in the Church, and not unwelcomed either.  The Novus Ordo Missae was not was the Council called for and I am about tired of hearing the NO in conjunction with the Council.  The Council did not call for a wholesale rewriting of consecrations, etc.  But, that is all part of the new lingo.  V2 equals NO. 

The end wil be that the liberals and traditionalists will not like this statement and for the same reasons.  The New Mass and the Old Mass really are different (though valid).****  The liberals want it to be much more different than it was intended to be and they for sure don’t want anybody saying it is like the old.  The traditionalists know that it is different and don’t like hearing that it isn’t different.  The only folks that will be happy with the comments by the Holy Father are the papal positivists, which constitute a majority of catholics (I think they are more than 50% anyway).

 

 

****It really chaps my backside that I gotta insert that little though valid crap after saying there is a real difference between the two masses.  The damned sophists have been successful in beating us at the word game… sophists always are good at that.

Obama is gonna lose…

I suppose anyone who might see this would say, “Well, duh, you’re a trad-cath.  Of course you want him to lose.”  But I think there is more to my doubts about his winning than my trad-catholicism.  The polls say everything.  There is no way on earth that he should be trailing, or tied with, or even just a couple points up on McCain right now.  This has to have to Obama folks scared to death.  His biggest mistake (and smallest) was not picking Hillary as VP.  Biggest because he is going to lose without her.  Smallest because had he won with her, Bill and Hill would have been really running the show and everybody would have known it, no matter what the protestations to the contrary would have been.

I figure it comes down to this:  How do you want the world to end?  Obama’s way or McCain’s way?  Still, I can’t see voting for the one candidate who is on the record FOR infanticide.  But, hey, I am not one to judge.

The Ten Commandments and Natural Law

The Decalogue has been often called the Law of God, with overtones of Divine Inspiration and Revelation. It may seem that what is being asserted is that the Ten Commandments belong to Supernatural truths that are not accessible to natural reason. That is, we couldn’t by any amount of thinking hard or reasoning from what we already know arrive at the Ten Commandments. But clearly this is false. For to assert this would be to assert, logically, that man cannot reason to or know that God exists, which he can do. And if we can reason to or know in some other way that God exists, then it is a short step to the first two precepts of the Decalogue*.

Many natural law thinkers have said that the Decalogue is a divinely inspired collection of Natural Law truths. This means that God didn’t give us anything new in the Ten Commandments. These were given because what had been clear in times past had been obscured by the sinfulness of men. But natural law finds its basis immediately in human nature and ultimately in the eternal law. Budziszewski and Rice have called the natural law basically a user manual for attaining the end for which man was made. While I have certain problems with that formulation, I think it captures the basic idea that is important. It tells us how to act as humans and directs us towards our end.

But if these laws or precepts are rooted ultimately in the eternal law, what about the question of dispensation?  For instance, can the precept Thou shalt not kill be dispensed; that is, can God either himself kill somebody or command that somebody be killed– especially the killing of an innocent (as in the case of Abraham and Isaac)?

Some have argued that the precepts of the Decalogue cannot be dispensed since they belong to the natural law strictly speaking.  This means that the precepts of the decalogue are either self-evident or are inferred from from these self-evident precepts.  This is the take that those in the Thomist tradition usually endorse.  Scotus argues that only the first two commandments belong to the natural law strictly.  But is that to say that the others do not?  Not at all.

Scotus says that the Second Table (precepts 4-10) belong to the natural law in an extended sense.  That is to say that these precepts, while not following with any logical necessity from the first two precepts, are in “exceeding harmony” with the self-evident precepts of the First Table.**  Since then these precepts do not possess the necessity of the First Table, then it is possible for these precepts to be dispensed.

Now regarding Thou shalt not kill, Thomas says that when God has commanded it or the state performs a just execution or there is a Just War, then this is not a violation of the precept since the precept is directed towards an undue or unjust killing.  Since God’s commands are just, a just death penalty is (well) just, and Just War is (again) just, then these are not dispensations.  Scotus says that these would constitute dispensations, but that is alright since the precept isn’t self-evident or derived from self-evident principles.

There is the interesting question about what is meant exactly by self-evident.  And the additional question of how it is that the precept against adultery is not necessary given human nature and the nature of sexuality.  Or say the precept (not in the Decalogue explicitly) against homosexuality.

Let’s explore those questions next time…
When I have had time to work them out myself!

 

 

* I will be using the traditional (Catholic and Lutheran) numbering of the Decalogue. See the following link for the enumeration of various religious groups.
** Scotus suspends judgment on whether the 3rd precept concerning Sabbath observance belongs to the natural law strictly speaking or not.  I will not go into the discussion here, but it is very, very interesting.  Therefore, when referring to the First Table, let the reader understand that I mean the first two precepts.

Atheist Prof. Desecrates the Eucharist

Father Z has the story.  It is really hard to pray for the guy and not against him.  But even the worst can be converted, as I am sure St. Paul would say.  But, man I wanna just twist this jerk’s head right off.

The Nominalist, Islamic and Sophist roots of Protestant Thinking

I have been listening to the esteemed Dr. Rao’s series on the legends created by enemies of the Catholic Church and what methods were used to debunk the Church throughout the ages.  He arrived at the Reformation and started making some very interesting points.

It seems that the distrust in natural reason to know anything for sure, which then led to a faith alone approach (literally alone- in fact, even contra-ratio), was accompanied with the notion that God’s will is supersupreme… so supersupreme that it can even do what it cannot possibly do.  The Laws that govern everything are arbitrary and could be changed in an instant.  The way of salvation could be one way today and if God willed it another way tomorrow.  Of course, this has its roots, in terms of “Christian” heresy, in the Muslim philosophers.  (Yes, Islam is a Christian heretical splinter group– shall we say the first major Protestant “Church”.)  Additionally, there was the humanist movement that was in full swing which was very adept at rhetoric and focussed more on quick wit than sharp logic and good reasoning.  Rao read numerous passages from Luther and Calvin as they took the age old approach of making your opponent look silly through mockery and not detached argument.  As Calvin put it, “Sure, little children can go for this popery, but not grown men…” and frequent name calling like Luther’s ”popish asses”, and ”drunk with the blood of the saints”, etc…  This goes back to Isocrates and his folks that were pounded by Plato and Aristotle.

This all held together with the emphasis on the “word” and its superiority.  Now the “word” was then taken to mean preeminently the “Word of God”, or the Bible.  This all a very puzzling situation, and as Rai points out in his talks, when different groups converge to try and take out the Church, they end up affirm mutually exclusive propositions in their efforts.  But many times they don’t see it, and worse, if they do, they contend that your human reason is not the judge of Scripture… Scripture is the judge of Scripture.  And if you question them on what that could possibly mean, they say, “So what do you have against the Bible?”  See how it works?  Quite odd indeed.

Well, this is not exhaustive and is only meant to make you think about something you might not have considered before… especially if you are protestant.  The whole mindset that went into doing the theology that resulted in the Protestant Reformation is a mindset that is dangerous and false.  That is not even to mention the fact that because of Luther, we got the Enlightenment and … ugh… Kant and his pals.

“All” Israel means what?

Michael Barber over at Singing in the Reign has an interesting piece on that old passage that keeps Dispensationalists alive as they continually twist Paul’s hard words to their own destruction, as our first Pope put it.

Rom. 11.25-26:

Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel [πᾶς Ἰσραὴλ] will be saved…

The conclusion of the argument is that the All is not a strictly universal all in the sense of the logical form of the universal proposition Every A is B.  Instead it is to be taken as referring to the 12 tribes of Israel as a whole, and not every individual within that class.  This is a weaker form of All and makes sense given the texts cited in the article.  Check it out!

Analyzing Analyticist

This is my rant against Analytic Philosophy after nearly being strangled to death by studying Analytic philosophers for nearly a year.

Let B stand for the the belief that Analytic Philosophical Reasoning is the best way to do philosophy.
Let S stand for the seriousness with which Analytic Philosophers take their enlightened position.
Let P stand for the prideful superciliousness which Analytic Philosophers hold for non-Analytic Philosophers.

Therefore, there is a belief B that is taken seriously S, and is then P used to look down upon the less enlightened.
In Anal code, the above would look roughly like:
BS, then P.

Let Toilet be a placeholder for BS and P.

Why Good Scotch is Good…

It is tasty.  It is subtle.  It is peaceful.  It is relaxing.  It lifts the mind from the base things of this world to the high things of this world.  God was good in giving us this masterful drink via the ingenuity of 4th and 5th century monks in Scotland.

Scotch.. another reason to be Catholic!  What else but the Catholic Church could have given us such a beautiful libation?

What is Faith, Part 2

Thus saith Newman- not Analytic, but also not Thomas Aquinas…

Lead on Kindly Light…

 

Now, in the first place, what is faith? it is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God. In the ordinary course of this world we account things true either because we see them, or because we can perceive that they follow and are deducible from what we do see; that is, we gain truth by sight or by reason, not by faith. You will say indeed, that we accept a number of things which we cannot prove or see, on the word of others; certainly, but then we accept what they say only as the word of man; and we have not commonly that absolute and unreserved confidence in them, which nothing can shake. We know that man is open to mistake, and we are always glad to find some confirmation of what he says, from other quarters, in any important matter; or we receive his information with negligence and unconcern, as something of little consequence, as a matter of opinion; or, if we act upon it, it is as a matter of prudence, thinking it best and safest to do so. We take his word for what it is worth, and we use it either according to our necessity, or its probability. We keep the decision in our own hands, and reserve to ourselves the right of reopening the question whenever we please. This is very different from Divine faith; he who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. He is as certain that the doctrine taught is true, as that God is true; and he is certain, because God is true, because God has spoken, not because he sees its truth or can prove its truth. That is, faith has two peculiarities;—it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with eye, or sees with the reason, but because it receives the tidings from one who comes from God. This is what faith was in the time of the Apostles, as no one can deny; and what it was then, it must be now, else it ceases to be the same thing. I say, it certainly was this in the Apostles’ time, for you know they preached to the world that Christ was the Son of God, that He was born of a Virgin, that He had ascended on high, that He would come again to judge all, the living and the dead. Could the world see all this? could it prove it? how then were men to receive it? why did so many embrace it? on the word of the Apostles, who were, as their powers showed, messengers from God. Men were told to submit their reason to a living authority. Moreover, whatever an Apostle said, his converts were bound to believe; when they entered the Church, they entered it in order to learn. The Church was their teacher; they did not come to argue, to examine, to pick and choose, but to accept whatever was put before them. No one doubts, no one can doubt this, of those primitive times. A Christian was bound to take without doubting all that the Apostles declared to be revealed; if the Apostles spoke, he had to yield an internal assent of his mind; it would not be enough to keep silence, it would not be enough not to oppose: it was not allowable to credit in a measure; it was not allowable to doubt. No; if a convert had his own private thoughts of what was said, and only kept them to himself, if he made some secret opposition to the teaching, if he waited for further proof before he believed it, this would be a proof that he did not think the Apostles were sent from God to reveal His will; it would be a proof that he did not in any true sense believe at all. Immediate, implicit submission of the mind was, in the lifetime of the Apostles, the only, the necessary token of faith; then there was no room whatever for what is now called private judgment. No one could say: “I will choose my religion for myself, I will believe this, I will not believe that; I will pledge myself to nothing; I will believe just as long as I please, and no longer; what I believe today I will reject tomorrow, if I choose. I will believe what the Apostles have as yet said, but I will not believe what they shall say in time to come.” No; either the Apostles were from God, or they were not; if they were, everything that they preached was to be believed by their hearers; if they were not, there was nothing for their hearers to believe. To believe a little, to believe more or less, was impossible; it contradicted the very notion of believing: if one part was to be believed, every part was to be believed; it was an absurdity to believe one thing and not another; for the word of the Apostles, which made the one true, made the other true too; they were nothing in themselves, they were all things, they were an infallible authority, as coming from God. The world had either to become Christian, or to let it alone; there was no room for private tastes and fancies, no room for private judgment.

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse10.html

SSPX on its way back?

Well, we can only hope.  Rorate and Father Z have a good bit to say about it.  Please pray for the Church.

What is Faith?

“Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of
things that appear not.”

Is this a good defininition?
St. Thomas thinks that it is, especially since the Apostle himself gives it. And while the definition is not like a technical definition, St. Thomas contends that it lacks none of the necessary components of a definition. What then is the “substance” of the “substance of things hoped for”? Obviously, it cannot be a substance in terms of the supreme genus as in Aristotelian logic. He says that substance may also be suitably used to indicate the “first beginning of a thing”. Thus it can be said that “the first self-evident principles are the substance of science, because, to wit, these principles are in us the first beginnings of science, the whole of which is itself contained in them virtually.” So then, faith is the first beginning of the things we hope for and do not see. The object of faith then is understood as something unseen, as the second part of the definition says. For what we hope for we do not see, “(Rom. 8:25): ‘We hope for that which we see not’: because to see the truth is to possess it.” 
St Thomas explains “evidence”; that it “is taken for the result of evidence. For evidence induces the intellect to adhere to a truth, wherefore the firm adhesion of the intellect to the non-apparent truth of faith is called ‘evidence’ here. Hence another reading has ‘conviction,’ because to wit, the intellect of the believer is convinced by Divine authority, so as to assent to what it sees not.”
He then goes on to define faith using the form of definition:

Accordingly if anyone would reduce the foregoing words to the form of a definition, he may say that “faith is a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent.”

He further explains,

In this way faith is distinguished from all other things pertaining to the intellect. For when we describe it as “evidence,” we distinguish it from opinion, suspicion, and doubt, which do not make the intellect adhere to anything firmly; when we go on to say, “of things that appear not,” we distinguish it from science and understanding, the object of which is something apparent; and when we say that it is “the substance of things to be hoped for,” we distinguish the virtue of faith from faith commonly so called, which has no reference to the beatitude we hope for.

Therefore, we must next ask what the proper object of faith is.

(All quotes from St. Thomas are from his Summa Theologica, Treatise on Theological Virtues, Question 4, Article 1.)

How do we come to assent to “mere Christianity?”

Sorry this is so long.
http://www.orestesbrownson.com/index.php?id=227;http://www.orestesbrownson.com/index.php?id=228

The Church against No-Church
Part I of II
Brownson’s Quarterly Review, April, 1845
Art. 1. The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany, January, 1845. Art. VI. The Church.
The Journal, the title of which we have here quoted, is the ably conducted organ of the American Unitarians. As a periodical, it is one in which we take no slight interest; for it is conducted by our personal friends, and through its pages, which were liberally opened to us, we were at one time accustomed to give circulation to our own crude speculations and pestilential heresies. We introduce it to our readers, however, not for the purpose of expressing any general opinion of its character, or the peculiar tenets of the denomination of which it is the organ ; but solely for the purpose of using the article which appeared in the January number, headed The Church, as a text for some remarks in defence of the Church against the prevalent No-Churchism of our age and community.
In our Review for October last, we refuted the pretensions of the High-Church Episcopalians ; in the last number, in the article on The British Reformers, we refuted Low-Churchism : we attempt now a refutation of No-Churchism, or the doctrine which admits the Church in name, but denies it in fact. All Protestant sects, just in proportion as they depart from Catholic unity, tend to No-Churchism ; and our Unitarians, who are the Protestants of Protestants, and who afford us a practical exemplification of what Protestantism is and must be, when and where it has the sense, the honesty, or the courage to be consequent, have already reached this important point. They cannot be said, in the legitimate sense of the word, to believe in any Church at all. They see clearly enough, that, if they once admit a Church at all, in any sense in which it is distinguishable from No-Church, they can neither justify the Reformers in seceding from the Catholic Church, nor themselves in remaining aliens from its communion. They have, therefore, the honesty and boldness to deny the Church altogether, and to admit in its place only a voluntary association of individuals for pious and religious purposes ; in which sense it is on a par with a Bible, Missionary, Temperance, or Abolition society, with scarcely any thing more holy in its objects, or more binding on its members.
The Examiner, in the article we have referred to, fully authorizes this statement; and though it by no means discards the sacred name of Church, it leaves us nothing venerable or worth contending for to be signified by it. The controversies, for the next few years, it thinks, will, not improbably, revolve around the question of the Church. ” What, then,” it asks, ” is the Church ? what is its authority ? what its importance ? what its true place among Christian ideas or influences ?” These are the questions ; and its purpose in the article under consideration is to offer a few remarks which may indicate a true answer to them, especially the last.
In answer to the question, What is the Church ? the writer replies, ” It is the whole company of believers, the uncounted and wide-spread congregation of all those who receive the Gospel as the law of life. It is coextensive with Christianity ; it is the living Christianity of the time, be that more or less, be it expressed in one mode of worship or another, in one or another variety of internal discipline. The Church of Christ comprehends and is composed of all his followers.” pp. 78, 79.
The answer to the question, What is the importance of the Church ? is not very clearly set forth. Perhaps this is a point on which the writer has not yet attained to clear and distinct views. It is, probably, one of those points on which “more light is to break forth.” The place of the Church among Christian ideas and influences is also not very definitely determined ; but it would appear, according to the Examiner, that the sacred writers had two ideas,for they were not, like our modern reformers, men of only one idea, and these two ideas were, one the Church, the other the individual soul. We do not mean to say that the writer really intends to teach that the Church is an idea, for a ” company of believers” can hardly be called an idea, nor can the individual soul; but he probably means to teach that the sacred writers had two ideas, or rather two points of view, from which they contemplated this company of believers,-the one collective, the other individual. “They loved to collect in ideathe members of Christ, as they styled them, under one idea, and present them in this relation of unity to their readers. Thus viewed, the Church became the emblem of Christian influences and Christian benefits. It expressed all Christ had lived for, or died for. He had loved it, and given himself for it. It was ‘the pillar and ground of the truth.’ It was «the body’ of which he was the head.”p. 79.This unity, however, is purely ideal. The only unity really existing consists merely in the similar sentiments, hopes, and aims of the individual members. But
” There was another idea on which the Apostles insisted still more strenously, that of the individual soul. They taught the importance of the individual soul. Around this, as the one object of interest, were gathered the revelations and commandments of the Gospel. Personal responsibleness in view of privileges, duties, sins, temptations was their great theme. They preached the Gospel to the soul in its individual exposure and want. It is the peculiarity of our religion, its vital peculiarity, that it makes the individual the object of its address, its immediate and its final action. Christianity divested of this distinction becomes powerless, and void of meaning. It contradicts and subverts itself.” Ib.

A Prayer for Protestants

I got this from my good friend Duns over at Inconvenience Rightly Considered.  Very cute.

 

May God be kind to captive fish
Who dwell in little bowls and wish
To swim, and can’t, and have no notion
Of what has happened to the ocean.

And may He Bless in aviaries
Continually caged canaries,
Who wonder, when they try to fly,
What can have happened to the sky.

(From the pen of the never to be sufficiently maligned)

Fr. Leonard Feeney S.J.

Nice.