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Monthly Archives: December 2012

The Concept of Catholic Unity in the Doctrine of the Eucharist at the time of Trent

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Paul Bassett in Bryan Cross, Reformation, Roman Catholicism, Unity

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The last time I posted here I examined Bryan Cross’s claim for unity in the Roman Catholic Church.  It was my intention to apply Bryan’s guidelines to a specific case that he mentioned – i.e. abortion – to show that his claim, in at least that instance, did not meet the “visibility” standard he required for unity to exist.  I hope to have been fair in my examination and believe that said examination disproved Bryan’s thesis on his own grounds.

But that exercise caused me to reflect more broadly on the Roman claim to unity as it might apply to other aspects of the Roman Catholic Church so that Bryan’s claim might be either resurrected or, in the alternative, my findings might find a broader foundation.  And it then occurred to me that it might be well to start at the top, or the summit of the Roman Catholic faith, the Eucharist.[i]  And in keeping with the theme of John Bugay’s blog, special emphasis will be given to this topic during the time of the Reformation, specifically the Council of Trent.  The question before us then is: Can we discern a visible unity in the Roman Catholic Church concerning their doctrine of the Eucharist at the time of Trent?  And secondly, did Trent create the foundation for unity into the future on this one doctrine or did it not?  Let’s begin.

Trent.

The background leading to The Council of Trent is an intricate patchwork of political maneuvering, self-interest and preservation.  The fact that the north German princes had adopted Lutheranism in their territories was an irritant to Emperor Charles for it provided them a club with which to keep him at bay.  And this was a vexing annoyance because the Emperor’s attention was drawn continually to the threat of Islam to the east.  The more he had to deal with intransigent Lutherans, the less he could focus on the march of the Saracens.

The growth of Protestantism was also a concern for Rome because the more territories that became Protestant the less cash flowed to the Vatican and the more doubt was cast on Rome’s claim to universalism.  Additionally, Rome had been selling bishoprics to the highest bidder as a standard practice for a long time.  Rich bishops, having procured multiple sees, were simply absent from their dioceses; a situation which caused the locals to wonder what, in the end, they were really paying for. This was another practice badly in need of reform.

Doctrinal problems abounded, too.  The Protestants were developing competing doctrines which Rome viewed as confusions for the faithful.  Chief among these were the contending doctrines of church authority, the justification of sinners and the Eucharist.  It was time for reform and the Fathers at Trent had their hands full.

Trent and the Eucharist

Trent dealt with the doctrine of the Eucharist in two of its sessions: XIII and XXII.  In the former it formalized the doctrine of transubstantiation; in the latter it asserted the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist.  Transubstantiation was one of several competing doctrines of the age.  It “was never made official in the medieval Church, but got weighty backing even before Aquinas’s time when it was used in documents of the Lateran Council of the Church in 1215.”[ii]  And this fact, that of competing Eucharistic doctrines, goes to the heart of our investigation.  At the time of Trent, there was a lack of unity from Rome on this crucial matter.  And transubstantiation itself required a foundation in the pagan philosophy of Aristotle, a philosophy that was not universally accepted even within the fold of Rome:

From the fourteenth century, most philosophers and theologians, particularly in northern Europe, did not in fact believe this (Thomistic doctrine). They were nominalists, who rejected Aristotle’s categories… Nominalists could only say of transubstantiation as a theory of the Mass that it was supported by the weight of opinion among very many holy men in the Church, and therefore it ought not to be approached through the Thomist paths of reason, but must be accepted as a matter of faith.  Once that faith in the Church’s medieval authorities was challenged, as it was in the sixteenth century, the basis for belief in transubstantiation was gone, unless one returned to Thomism, the thought of Aquinas.  Those who remained in the Roman obedience generally did this; but in sixteenth-century Europe, thousands of Protestants were burnt at the stake for denying an idea of Aristotle, who had never heard of Jesus Christ.[iii]

The purpose of the Tridentine declaration on transubstantiation was almost certainly motivated by politics and not strictly theology.    The Catholic Encyclopedia notes, for example, that this doctrine of transubstantiation was proclaimed principally as a stand against the Reformers.  It specifically says that Trent’s proclamations were aimed at the “widely divergent errors” of Zwingli, Œcolampadius and Calvin.[iv]  In other words, the proclamation of Trent was intended to stake out one opinion from among many so as to maintain a divided Christendom against the Protestants.  And it certainly left the Catholic nominalists out in the cold.  This motivation of the Council is confirmed by the Roman Catholic scholar, Fr. Robert Bireley:

Moreover, the council fathers followed the policy of not discussing theological differences among Catholics; their full thrust was toward delineating clearly the Catholic stance vis-à-vis the Protestants.[v]

There are a couple of things here that run counter to a claim to unity.  First, if Rome was to manifest its intent to be the “universal” (i.e. catholic) church, why would it stake out one position which further divided Christendom?  If the goal was ecclesiological, would not it have found a way of restoring unity?  Secondly, the position taken by the Magisterium at Trent did nothing to reconcile the internal divisions within the Roman Catholic communion.  Its canons were therefore not an exercise in unity but rather of power.

But perhaps more interesting to our discussion of the unity of Rome vis-à-vis the Eucharistic doctrines of Trent is what that council did with the principle of sacrifice.   Canon I of the Session XXII has this to say:

If any one saith, that in the mass a true and proper sacrifice is not offered to God; or, that to be offered is nothing else but that Christ is given us to eat; let him be anathema.

The idea of sacrifice relative to the Eucharist is of long standing in the Christian tradition.  J.N.D. Kelly tells that the Didache used the term “sacrifice” in the context of the Eucharist as early as the end of the first century.  With regard to the specific nature of the sacrifice, the Didache, however, “provides no clear answer.”[vi]  Justin Martyr viewed sacrifice as the “prayers and thanksgivings” offered to God.  Irenaeus believed the “bread and wine offered to God…[are] first-fruits of the earth which Christ has instructed us to offer.”[vii]  And only first with Ignatius do we find the correlation between the sacrifice of the Eucharist and the flesh of Christ.  Ignatius was responding to the Docetists who held that Christ had no physical presence but merely “appeared” human.  All of this is intended to show how variegated was the idea of the Eucharist in general, and the idea of a “sacrifice” in particular leading up to Trent.  This is confirmed by Fr. Robert J. Daly, writing in the context of the notion of sacrifice promulgated at Trent:

Catholic eucharistic theology on the eve of Trent was much broader and much more in continuity with earlier traditions than it was at the end of the sixteenth century…  Reacting against the Reformers, Trent defined the Mass as a “true and proper sacrifice…but left it to the theologians…to argue over what sacrifice is.[viii]

And argue they did!  In fact, Daly outlines four competing theories of “sacrifice” that resulted from the Tridentine proclamation in the fifty years following Trent; all with notable Roman Catholic theologians in support and none which received magisterial approbation or rejection.  Think of it, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church at the time of Trent and thereafter, could not produce a “unity” with regard to the “sum of their faith”, the Eucharist.

Daly attributes the continuance of the discord to what he calls a “massive methodological mistake” on the part of the theologians.

They approached the matter backward.  Instead of looking first to the Christ-event and letting that define their thinking, both Protestants and Catholics first defined sacrifice phenomenologically and then applied that definition to the Mass…This massive methodological mistake was then matched by a mistake in content that apparently no one thought to question: namely, the idea, increasingly accepted by almost all involved, that a real sacrifice requires a real change or destruction of the victim, and then the application of this idea to the Mass.  There was no clear awareness that the Christ-event had done away with sacrifice in the history-of-religions sense of the term.  Theologians still dealt with the Old and New Testaments in a relatively undifferentiated way, that is, without any historicizing or differentiating hermeneutic, applying to the Mass ideas of sacrifice taken from the Old Testament almost as if Christ never existed.[ix] (Emphasis in the original)

We can clearly see that the doctrine of “sacrifice” as imposed by the Council of Trent resulted in more diversity of opinion, and not less.  And rather than clarifying what had gone before, the Magisterium simply allowed theologians to “work it out”.  When the theologians produced more diversity in doctrine Rome did not correct them or create any unity at all.   And that these “methodological mistakes” have been allowed to perpetuate creating even more disunity in the Roman communion.

Conclusion:

We began this investigation with two questions.  First, “Can we discern a visible unity in the Roman Catholic Church concerning their doctrine of the Eucharist at the time of Trent?” And secondly, “did Trent create the foundation for unity into the future on this one doctrine or did it not?”

The answer to the first question is clearly “no”.  With regard to the doctrine of transubstantiation, Trent took a position for political reasons while disregarding a significant number its own theologians.  Because “unity” requires participation of an organization as a whole, Rome exhibited disunity in this regard.  The Council’s imposition of this doctrine on the Roman Catholic Church is not an example of unity, but rather a political tyranny.

And we must likewise answer the second question in the negative.   The failure of Rome to define the parameters of a “true and proper” sacrifice left the matter to theologians.  We have seen that Rome did nothing to unify this doctrine but rather left it to be haggled over by theologians.  So not only did Rome not produce unity in this doctrine, it showed no interest in doing so.

We must conclude that at the time of Trent the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church was unable to create or manifest the “unity” about which Bryan Cross maintains it has always had.  And we further conclude that in matters relating to the very pinnacle of the Roman faith, Trent was a force for disunity. Finally, we observe that Bryan’s claim is not rehabilitated in this process and we maintain that the Church of Rome and its Magisterium did not display the requisite visible evidence for unity as required by him.

Soli Deo Gloria.


[i] The Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to the Eucharist as “the sum and summary of our faith”. (paragraph 1327)

[ii] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation.  New York: Penguin Books, 2003.  P. 25

[iii] MacCulloch, op. cit.  p. 26

[iv] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05573a.htm

[v] Bireley, Robert, S.J. The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation.  Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999.  P. 49

[vi] Kelly, J.N.D.  Early Christian Doctrines.  Fifth ed.  New York:  Continuum, 2008. P. 196

[vii] Kelly, op. cit. p. 197

[viii] Daly, Robert J., S.J.  “Robert Bellarmine and Post-Tridentine Eucharistic Theology”, in From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations. Ed. Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.  P. 96

[ix] Daly, op. cit. pp. 96-97

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The Theology of Les Miserables

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by Paul Bassett in Uncategorized

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Timothy Dalrymple has offered some interesting insights into the theological themes of this recent movie here…

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/12/29/the-theology-of-les-miserables/

I’ve been a fan of Les Mis for decades and have seen several outstanding live performances.  Unfortunately, those set the bar so high as to dull my appreciation for the movie.  I much prefer the Queen’s Company Production from 2010 which is currently airing on PBS.

Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools.

21 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by Paul Bassett in Uncategorized

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Gun control

John Fund at NRO lays out the case that the cause of mass shootings is the imbalance in power in favor of lawbreakers.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335739/facts-about-mass-shootings-john-fund#

 

When Tolerance Becomes Intorlerance

21 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by Paul Bassett in Uncategorized

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Gay marriage LGBTQ Tolerance

The Witherspoon Institute has published in interesting studies of the effects of the legalizing of same-sex marriage in Canada ten years on.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/11/6758/

Comparing lifestyles of Homosexuals

http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS04C02

Partial Unity in Roman Catholicism

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Paul Bassett in Bryan Cross, Roman Catholicism, Unity

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Bryan Cross recently posted an article  that caught my eye.  Apparently, the old Catholic bromide that Protestants are too divided to be representatives of Christ has backfired.  A closer look at the data shows that Rome is divided, too.   Now comes Mr. Cross with his post, “The “Catholics are Divided Too” Objection”, which is an effort to help his friends answer this new Protestant rejoinder.

I will leave it to you, the reader to digest all of the intricacies of Bryan’s post.  But my summary of his points is this:

1.            The Roman Catholic Church has unity which it derives from Christ’s unity in His role as prophet, priest and king.

2.            That unity is not only invisible but also visible.

3.            That unity does not stem from agreement among individual Catholics, but “by the unity of the doctrine taught by the Magisterium.”

In sum, the unity of Rome is divine, visible and evidenced by unwavering magisterial teaching.  I hope to have gotten that right.

And to wrap up this introduction I should be explicit about what I mean by the term, “unity”.  I am relying on the common usage found here.  “Unity” then is present when there is “oneness” that applies to the whole of an organism under discussion.  “Unity” does not apply where there is any diversity within an organization or when the term is applied, selectively, to part of the organization under discussion.

So, what to make of the differences that do exist between well-intentioned Catholics?  Bryan cautions us to divide these differences into three distinct types: disagreements “not of faith”, disagreements that are “of faith” and open theological questions about which the Magisterium has yet to pronounce. The first type is not a big deal because they “can be fully compatible with the simultaneous agreement between the disagreeing parties concerning matters of faith, and thus the simultaneous preservation of the unity of the bond of faith.”  The same is true for the open theological questions.  The problem arises for the unity of Roman Catholicism (URC), or for the appearance of a lack of URC, in those disagreements that are “of faith”.   Let’s have Bryan make clear this distinction:

“However, when Catholics dissent from the teaching of the Magisterium, either about theological doctrines such as transubstantiation or women’s ordination, or about moral issues such as contraception, abortion or the essential heterosexual character of marriage, they separate themselves from the unity of the Church’s faith.”

Disagreements between Catholics about matters “of faith” are the most serious but they do not rise to the level of disunity in the Roman communion because these disparities separate the individual Catholic from the unity of the Magisterium.  They do not represent disunity in the Magisterium.

Let’s take a look at a matter that would be considered “of faith”, about which the Magisterium has clearly and unequivocally pronounced and that Bryan has offered as an example; abortion.   Has the Magisterium exhibited the requisite “visible” unity which Bryan demands?

The current Roman Catholic teaching about abortion is encapsulated in paragraphs 2270, 2271 and 2272 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) which can be found here.  Because of its official nature, the Catechism represents the true teaching of the Magisterium.  So I hope that we can use this as a true matter “of faith” not to be construed as either a matter “not of faith” or an open theological question.

That teaching in summary is this: life begins at conception (2270), “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable” (2271),  and anyone engaging in an abortion “incurs excommunication latae sententiae” (that is, immediately)(2272).

Our first observation is that the Magisterium has not always taught that life begins at conception as per 2270. 

St. Jerome held that “the fetus [was] at no point of development a human.”   The early church relied heavily on Augustine’s teaching in the area of sexual ethics and Augustine did not believe that full human life began at conception.  Much later, Aquinas wrote, “We conclude therefore that the intellectual soul is created by God at the end of human generation…”, not at the beginning.  And this was the official view of the Roman Catholic Church accepted at the Council of Vienne (1312); said view never having been “officially repudiated.”[i]   And that brings us to the truly interesting story as it relates to URC.  At least a century before the Council of Vienne, Pope Innocent III supported abortion.  Let’s here from the devout Roman Catholic writer (Ph.D. Catholic University of America) John T. Noonan:

“A contrary view was manifested in canon 20 of the title “Voluntary and Chance Homicide.”  Canon 20, Sicut ex, was a letter of Innocent III to a Carthusian priory about a monk who had caused his mistress to abort.  The Pope held that the monk was not irregular if the fetus was not “vivified.”  The wider significance of the letter arose from the usual rules for imposing irregularity.  Irregularity was no mere technical deficiency, but a state in which the right to perform sacerdotal functions was suspended…Irregularity was automatically incurred by a cleric guilty of homicide (Decretals 5.12.6).  Hence, if the Carthusian monk was not irregular, the plain implication was that no homicide occurred in a stopping of life prior to the time a fetus received a soul.  Sicut ex cast doubt on the literalness of Si aliquis, which held contraception to be homicide.”[ii]

Pope Innocent III, the Vicar of Christ on earth, did not believe in life “at the moment of conception” and his writings influenced the ethics of the church for centuries.

In fact, four centuries later the Council of Trent upheld the view held by Augustine, Aquinas and Innocent:

“The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, for example, makes it clear that no human embryo could be informed with a human soul except after a certain period of time, as in the hylomorphic (Thomistic) commonplace.”[iii]

In further point of fact official Roman Catholic publications forbade the baptizing of fetuses until as late as 1895; a truly odd prohibition if life does begin at conception.[iv]  What we have, then, is a matter “of faith” which has received Magisterial attention from at least the time of Innocent III.   And we have a doctrine which is clearly contradicted by current magisterial teaching.

Now I assume that the Catholic rejoinder might well be the “development of doctrine” approach made fashionable by Cardinal Newman.  But it seems to me that this doesn’t apply because of the law of non-contradiction.  That is, a thing cannot simultaneously be both X and “not X”.  The magisterial Catholic doctrine of Aquinas and Innocent III cannot develop into the doctrine of the current Magisterium if for no other reason than they oppose each other.  Not to mention the fact that the current teaching would result in Innocent’s immediate self-excommunication.

Conclusion:

Therefore, a reasonable conclusion to this analysis of Bryan Cross’s attempted rehabilitation of the concept of the unity of the Roman Catholic Church is that there is, in fact, no URC and that for three reasons:

  1. By attempting to selectively apply the concept of unity to only one part of the Roman Catholic Church, Bryan fails by definition.  “Unity”, per se, must apply to the whole.
  2. Bryan creates an artificial standard by introducing the concept of matters “of faith” and matters “not of faith”.  Neither of these ideas has a relation to the concept of unity, per se, and are therefore irrelevant.  The concept of unity does not allow for this differentiation by definition, because the differentiation is an indication of diversity.
  3. Even allowing for Bryan’s artificial definition of unity, we have seen that in “matters of faith” the very Magisterium of the Catholic Church has not only differed with itself over time but that it has, in at least the matter under discussion, created directly opposing doctrines.  This analysis falls under the “visible” nature of Catholic unity which is required by the two popes Bryan cited and his own conviction.  Teachings that are in direct opposition are the clearest examples of diversity and they void any claim to unity, per se.

For these reasons, we conclude that there is no URC.

Maybe it would be better to disregard these traditions of men and rely on the words of Christ:

Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. (Luke 12:51)

I wish you all every blessing of this Christmas Season.


[i] Dombrowski, Daniel A. and Deltete, Robert. A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion.  Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press; 2000.  P. 35

[ii] Noonan, John T., Jr.  Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.  P. 232 ff

[iii] Dombrowski and Deltete.  Op. cit. p. 38

[iv] Dombrowski and Deltete document how the 1617 edition of the Roman Ritual contained such prohibition.  They further note that this “remained unchanged until 1895.”  P. 48

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anactofmind

If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

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If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

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If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

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If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

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If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

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