Monthly Archives: January 2013

The Four Competing Eucharistic Doctrines of the Roman Church resulting from the Council of Trent

12 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in Eucharist, Reformation, Roman Catholicism, Trent, Unity

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In my last post I endeavored to explore the diversity of doctrine in the Roman Church with regard to the pinnacle of its faith – the Eucharist – at the time of the Council of Trent.  And in that post I mentioned Fr. Daly’s examination[i] of four competing doctrines resulting from the work of theologians in the years after Trent.  A gentleman named Scot asked me to enumerate them and so I shall.

Fr. Daly begins with the current state of the Eucharistic celebration and works back to Trent.  It seems that his analysis causes him to note fundamental problems in the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist today, which finds its roots in Trent:

It should be noted that this idea of sacramental representation, although now quite characteristic of contemporary Catholic theology, is actually one of the weak points of that theology.  For this theory – that the historical saving acts of Christ are “metahistorically” made present to us – is not significantly supported by the biblical witness, nor by the Jewish background, nor by broad patristic evidence.  Still more, it is also the kind of theory that creates further problems, since there is little agreement among scholars on how to explain what is being asserted.[ii]

So what followed from Trent’s “true and proper sacrifice” language was really not at all clear or unified.  In fact, Daly writes,

…one must remember that Trent never explained what it meant by “sacrifice”.  That was left to the theologians to argue about…Inevitably, the Catholic theology of the Eucharist after Trent became extremely complicated. [iii]

Fr. Daly then relies on the work of Marius Lepin[iv], a Sulpician and founder of the Servants of Jesus who was an early 20th century scholar.  It was Lepin who identified the four competing theologies resulting from Trent’s declarations.   And they are:

Theory I: “The sacrifice does not require a real change in the victim; the Mass contains only a figure of the immolation of Christ.”[v]

Theory II: “The sacrifice requires a real change of the material offered; in the Mass the change takes place in the substance of the bread and wine.”[vi]

Theory III: “The sacrifice requires a real change of the material offered; in the Mass, the change affects Christ himself.” [vii]

Theory IV: “The sacrifice requires a real change; nevertheless, there is in the Mass a change only in the species of the sacrament.”[viii]

Fr. Daly relying on Fr. Lepin’s work describes the various theologians who supported these theories and gives a detailed explanation of their intricacies.  I will leave it to the reader to explore Fr. Daly’s work at length for that level of detail.

At any rate, this all supports our previous findings that the concept of unity did not exist with regard to the doctrine of the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic Church at the time of Trent.  And it also shows that Trent sowed the seeds for greater and not lesser disunity in what followed.

Soli Deo Gloria.

 

[i] [i] 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.  Pgs. 81-101

[ii] Daly, op. cit. p. 85

[iii] Daly, op. cit. p. 89

[iv] Lepin, Marius.  L’idée du sacrifice de la Messe d’après les théologiens depuis l’origine jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Beauchesne, 1926) as cited in Daly, op. cit.

[v] Daly, op. cit. p. 89 with explanation on page 90.

[vi] Daly, p. 90

[vii] Daly, p. 91

[viii] Daly, p. 93

George Weigel – Lost in Time

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Abortion, George Weigel, Religious Freedom, Roman Catholicism

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For those of you who may not be familiar, George Weigel is an uber-Catholic who writes regularly about all things pertaining to the Roman Catholic Church.  He has an engaging – if pointed – style and he intends to see to it that Catholics, by golly, get their religion right.  And it is apparent from his frequent offerings that George knows what is right!

In his most recent article, “Notre Dame Punts” , Weigel is alarmed that America’s leading Catholic university could have done something so heinous as to squander a free 30 second commercial at last night’s BCS championship game – a commercial that might have reached “the largest audience ever to watch a college football game.”  And what would Weigel have advised Notre Dame to promote in that illustrious half minute ad?  His answer,

one or another (or both) of the two causes that define serious, culture-forming Catholicism in 21st-century America: the pro-life cause and the cause of religious freedom.

(I don’t know about you, but I am certainly gratified to know that Catholicism is now defined by two causes in the 21st century because they were certainly defined by only one in the last part of the 20th!)

I find that admission to be quite staggering.  If we may recall of all the grandiose claims that Rome reserves for herself – i.e. she is the only church founded by Christ whose message comes to us today in “unbroken” succession from the Apostles; she has the only group on earth whose leadership is protected from error by the Holy Spirit; her CEO, the pope, has reserved the right to himself to make immaculate pronouncements – the only two that Weigel finds appropriate to bring to a large American audience are abortion and religious freedom.  Those are the defining issues this century.

But it is safe to say that those two issues are historical anomalies in the Roman communion.

The first issue is abortion.  Adman Weigel’s recommended copy for the ad Notre Dame “should have” used is thus: “We’re Notre Dame: We help women in crisis pregnancies and we defend the right to life for all, from conception until natural death.”  But that is not – I say again, not – the historic view of the Roman Catholic Church.  As we have noted here Pope Innocent III defended one of his priests who had caused his mistress to abort.  St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “We conclude therefore that the intellectual soul is created by God at the end of human generation….”  In other words man, the perfect union of body and soul, is not achieved at conception but “at the end of human generation”.  When we add to that Pope Leo XIII’s absolute endorsement of Thomism as official Catholic philosophy at the end of the 19th century, it is ever so clear that the Holy Spirit saved Msgr. Weigel from making an egregious and embarrassing historical mistake in his ad.  To sum the matter in a way reminiscent of recent U.S. political campaigns, Rome voted for abortion before it voted against it.

And Mr. Weigel suffers from a similar historical myopia with regard to the issue of religious freedom.  It must be remembered that Pope Boniface VIII in his infamous bull of 1312 (Unam Sanctam) declared that there is no salvation outside the Church of Rome.  Now that is hardly ecumenical language!  And it’s hard to describe the murder by Rome of the Waldensians and others as honoring their “religious freedom”.  And what of the seven hundred years where the Bishop of Rome oversaw the enslavement of the Jews in the ghettos throughout the Papal States?  Was that a concern for religious freedom?

Here is the official view of religious freedom as written by the same Leo XIII:

it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.

According to Leo XIII, Weigel’s position is “erroneous”.  The State is to be either united with, or subservient to, the Roman Church and its pope.  Period.

Weigel tells the amusing story of an opposing team’s chaplain remarking, in a game against Notre Dame, the God doesn’t care who wins a football game.  The then-coach of Notre Dame, in his best Will Rogers persona, replied, “Yes, but his Mother does!”  Well, if last night’s 42-14 rout of Notre Dame by Alabama is any indication, she must not care anymore.  But maybe she cares enough to keep her university from making blatantly erroneous claims about the history of Catholic teaching.

Maybe their ad should have said, “We’re Notre Dame.  We have a history department.  George Weigel doesn’t.”

Soli Deo Gloria