Category: Theology

Sometimes I post links on here to distract from the fact that I am not updating Opus Publicum very often. At other times I post links because I sincerely believe, in my heart and mind, that they need to be read. This is one of those times.

Though I have never met the author of the excellent web-log Ursus Elisei, I have had to the privilege of corresponding with him through e-mail and social media. His latest post, “Letter to a Friend on Ressourcement and the New Theology,” expresses magnificiently what I hope will be a growing number of Catholics’ reservations concerning the intellectual inheritance left behind by the previous two generations of theologians. This post isn’t the mad screed of an aimless dissenter; it is the forceful indictment of a true reactionary whose incisiveness is trebled by his boldness.

For Sunday, how about a lengthy block quote from Hilaire Belloc?

Incidentally, I may say that the position of the Papacy is misunderstood when it is regarded as a despotic authority acting capriciously. It is part and parcel of the Catholic Church, defining and guiding—not inventing—doctrines, and identified with the general life of Catholicism. Catholics act as they do, not because one individual has taken into his head to give them orders on a sudden, but because they are in tune with the whole spirit of the Catholic Church, of which the Pope is the central authority.

As an example of the misunderstanding, I may quote the attitude often taken by Non-Catholics towards the advice given by Leo XIII and subsequent Popes in the matter of Scholastic Philosophy. “Pius X,” we are told, “ordained that a philosophy which flourished in the thirteenth century should be the philosophy of the twentieth,” and this attitude is compared to that of an American fundamentalist denying the conclusions of geology. All that is out of focus. No such thing was ever “ordained.” Cardinal Mercier’s great revival of scholasticism at Louvain was approved and commended, and its study warmly supported. But no Catholic is bound to accept that particular system or its terms. I may say in passing that anyone who does adopt it seems to me wise, for it derives from Aristotle, the tutor of the human race, and it represents the highest intellectual effort ever made by man; nor is there conflict between it and evidence, nor any reason to believe that our own particularly muddled time with its disuse of reason is philosophically superior merely because it comes last. But scholasticism is only a human system of thought; it is not a revelation; and the idea that it could be thought equivalent to the Faith or that the Papacy was here imposing it as of Faith could only occur to one wholly unfamiliar with the ancient and abiding Religion of Christendom.

This is a minor matter in the grand scheme of things, but an online acquaintance of mine, in a discussion of the somewhat unedifying 2007 First Things debate between Alyssa Pickstick and Fr. Edward Oakes concerning the latter’s groundbreaking critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar (mentioned briefly here), came upon Fr. Oakes’s later commentary on the debate in which he tossed tar-and-feathers in Pickstick’s direction:

Since I mentioned Hans Urs von Balthasar in the previous post, I thought I would call attention to this singularly excellent expose on one of the most troubling “orthodox” theologians of the last century.

If we, traditional Catholics, stop talking about the Second Vatican Council, will the liberals? How about the neo-Catholics? I don’t mean “never mention the Council again.” Rather, I mean going on almost endlessly — and negatively — about this-or-that ambiguity in the conciliar texts or this-or-that problematic interpretation, implementation, or downright imposition in the name of the “Spirit of the Council.” Despite the hopes of some traditionalists, Vatican II is not simply going to go away. I suspect that most would prefer that, given present realities, our current Pope refrain from calling another council to “update,” “discuss,” or “clarify” Vatican II. Let it rest. It has only been 50 years. And while there may be a good argument out there that the last five decades has sucked dry the Council’s relevancy, that doesn’t mean it needs an official point-by-point overhaul either. To attempt one now would likely lead to further, not less, ambiguities. Moreover, it seems as if the present leadership of the Church is even more divided and, in some instances, doctrinally suspect than the body of fathers who came together in October 1962 to inaugurate a new “springtime for the Church.”