Category Archives: Trent

How Catholics are supposed to interpret the Scriptures.

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Hermeneutics, Matthew 16, Roman Catholicism, Trent

≈ 13 Comments

In a recent exchange I had with Joseph Richardson (which can be found here ) I was surprised to learn that Joseph was unaware of the rules the Catholic Church maintains about the proper use of the Scriptures. My point to Joseph then was that he was using Scriptures like a Protestant. He was surprised by that comment and responded this way:

First: What makes you say, “Roman Catholics are not allowed to offer their own interpretations of Scripture”? Is being Catholic somehow a handicap to my powers of reasoning? What makes Protestants able to offer their own interpretations of Scripture, and Catholics unable? Because this is in fact my own interpretation, based in a careful study of the Greek, of the whole of Scripture, not just the passage you are drawing attention to, and of the teachings of the Fathers.

So to make the case clear how Catholics are bound to use the Scriptures and to answer Joseph’s questions I will explain the Catholic requirements for using the Scriptures. This explanation will come exclusively from Catholic sources and are noted for easy verification. I would like to point out at the beginning that all of the sources used in the post are “dogmatic” for Catholics. That means that the information we will explore is not “optional” for Catholics to believe; it is required.

The first thing we have to do is discover the Roman Catholic understanding of divine revelation. That is important because Rome takes a different view than the rest of Christianity and because Rome binds the consciences of her members to that view. That is to say, to be a Roman Catholic means that you affirm this view, without reservation. The second thing we have to do is understand the role of the Magisterium in the interpretation of the Scriptures for the Catholic faithful: what is its role and what are Catholics required to believe. Finally, we will outline how Catholics are, based on this information, supposed to interpret the Bible.

Roman Catholic Revelation – the three legged stool.

Roman Catholicism has a unique doctrine of divine revelation. And the Tradition of Roman Catholicism – dating at least back to the Council of Trent – is that divine revelation to a Catholic comes via three inextricably interconnected sources: Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium. Revelation cannot be derived from the Scriptures alone (because that is a Protestant claim) or from Tradition alone, or from the Magisterium alone.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the matter this way:

95 It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others. Working together, each in its own way, under the action of the one Holy Spirit, they all contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.[i]

All three elements must be in play when Catholics use the Scripture. None of the three parts – Tradition, Scripture or Magisterium – is sufficient to stand on its own. So Catholics are not free to use only Scripture to make whatever case they are attempting.

And the Catechism clarifies this even further:

82 As a result the Church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of Revelation is entrusted, “does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone.[ii]

Roman Catholics who use Scripture alone to make their case are not following the Catholic understanding of divine revelation. They are acting like Protestants.

The Magisterium – the sole, official interpreter of Scripture.

You may remember that Joseph asked me, “What makes you say, “Roman Catholics are not allowed to offer their own interpretations of Scripture”? And the answer is Rome.

The brief historical note is that offering one’s own interpretation of Scripture was the Roman Catholic caricature of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. At the time of the Reformation Rome spoke out vociferously against the idea of “private interpretation” even going so far as to place anyone so doing under legal sanction. As a response to their perception of this rampant “private interpretation” the Fathers at the Council of Trent declared thusly:

Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, It decrees, that no one, relying on his own skill, shall … presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church,–whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures,–hath held and doth hold…[iii]

So Joseph unwittingly has become, according to Trent, a “petulant spirit” because he has relied on his own study and not the “true sense” of the Scriptures as is required by Rome. Or, he has not shown that his interpretation lines up with Rome’s official interpretation.

How do we know that Rome has the “true sense” of the Scripture? Because she has the Magisterium and it is to the Magisterium – alone – to provide the authentic interpretation of Scripture.

100 The task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the Magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in communion with him.[iv]

Vatican II affirms in its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum:

For all of what has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God[v].

In the context of Roman Catholicism, it is very clear that the Magisterium is entrusted “solely” with interpreting the Scriptures.

The Catholic Dogma Applied

We have seen so far that Roman Catholics must follow the dogmatic pronouncements of their denomination when interpreting the Scriptures. This means that they must do so in a manner that shows they are resting on all three “legs” of the Catholic paradigm. So when Joseph Richardson brings out a verse like Matthew 16:18 and, based on his own careful study, opines that this verse is a support for the papacy he is ignoring the other two-thirds of Catholic method.

What Joseph – and other Catholics must do – is show that his understanding of this verse comports with the “true sense” which the Magisterium holds today, and which the Tradition of the church has “always held”. Then – and only then – can Joseph proclaim publicly what Matthew 16:18 means. But simply proclaiming the verse without Magisterial approbation and without maintaining Tradition is decidedly un-Catholic. That is why I told Joseph he was using Scripture like a Protestant.

In Conclusion.

In response to the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura, the Roman Catholic Church dogmatically defined God’s revelation to His church as consisting of Tradition, the Magisterium and Sacred Scripture. This clearly delineated Rome from the Reformers who asserted the sufficiency of Scripture. A further response was to place the job of official Scriptural interpretation in the hands of the Magisterium whose task was to maintain consistency in its interpretations with the Tradition of the church.

Therefore any Roman Catholic must use the entire “three legged stool” in his argument. He cannot rely on Scripture alone without being accused of using Protestant methods. He must prove from Tradition, the Magisterium and the Scriptures that the understanding he is advancing is that “true sense” of Scripture that Rome says it “has held and holds”.

In other words, if Rome is going to construct a three-legged stool, the least they should do is sit on it.

Soli Deo Gloria

[i] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PM.HTM

[ii] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PL.HTM

[iii] DECREE CONCERNING THE EDITION, AND THE USE, OF THE SACRED BOOKS; Trent IV

[iv] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PN.HTM

[v] (DEI VERBUM, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Second Vatican Council. CHAPTER III; Sacred Scripture, Its Inspiration and Divine Interpretation. http://www.ewtn.com/library/councils/v2revel.htm

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Comments for my friend, Joseph Richardson

01 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Hermeneutics, Matthew 16, Papacy, Roman Catholicism, Trent

≈ 4 Comments

Joseph Richardson who owns The Lonely Pilgrim stopped by last Sunday and asked for some comments on his post, “A Biblical Argument for the Authority of the Papacy”.  Judging from this post and a few others I read Joseph is a devout Roman Catholic who is taken with the defense of his denomination.  And his title indicates that he believes the Bible gives the Pope his authority.

Joseph begins with the Catechism of the Catholic Church and a discussion about Christ as head of the church and quickly proceeds to the Scriptures by stating,

I think an honest reading of Scripture requires one to acknowledge that Jesus did delegate His authority, first to the Twelve Apostles as a group and then to Peter in particular.

Thereafter Joseph relies on the usual Scriptural suspects – Matthew 16:16-18, John 20:21-23, etc. – all the while offering his take on them.  And that gives rise to my first comment.

Roman Catholics are not allowed to offer their own interpretations of Scripture.

One of the cardinal points of difference between Rome and Protestants at the time of the Reformation was how one was to interpret the Scriptures.  The Protestants held that God worked in both the faithful preaching of the Word and in its faithful reception (i.e. 1 Corinthians 15:1).  Rome objected.  She felt that this led to “unbridled spirits” interpreting Scriptures in a multitude of possibly conflicting and incorrect ways.  So Rome placed this dogma on all faithful Roman Catholics:

Furthermore, in order to check unbridled spirits, it decrees, that no one, relying on his own judgment, shall, in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which holy mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held and holds,  or even contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, even though such interpretations should never at any time be published. Those who act contrary to this shall be made known by the ordinaries and punished in accordance with the penalties prescribed by the law.[i]

So any interpretation of Scripture used by a Roman Catholic must conform to that “sense which holy mother Church…has held and holds” and they must not be contradictory to the “unanimous teaching of the Fathers.”

But it cannot be shown that what Rome holds today she has always held with regard to any of the Scriptures Joseph cited.  And, in fact, it can be shown that the Roman Church has varied its interpretation of Matthew 16:18 so widely that it is impossible to tell what she “has held and holds” with regard to that key verse.   So where that leaves us is that Joseph is acting like a Protestant in interpreting the Scriptures to support Roman doctrines.  I don’t think that was his intent.

Joseph ends his post with a claim that a “literal interpretation” of Scriptures is friendly to Rome:

“Evidently, we Catholics interpret Scripture more literally and realistically than you, and accept it more readily for what it actually says in its plainest sense.”  And that leads to my second and final observation:

A Literal Reading of Scripture is not friendly to Rome.

A few weeks ago, I was made aware of a Presbyterian minister who had converted to Rome.  Although I did not listen to the entirety of his interview on EWTN, I do recall that one of his motivations was the “literal meaning” of the Bible and in his case the 6th chapter of John and his understanding of that chapter’s relevance to the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist.  (It seems very odd to me that someone would use the most allegorical of the Gospels as the basis for a literal interpretation but that is another matter.)  My point is that Catholics take a “pick-and-choose” approach to their literal interpretations.

Consider Matthew 16.  Verse 18 is the seminal verse most commonly used in support of Rome’s authority.  But verse 23 – just 5 short verses later – has Christ Himself calling Peter “Satan”.  Is Rome prepared to interpret that verse literally?

And following on to Matthew 16, the Old Testament has dozens of passages that refer to the “Rock” and it is always God, not a man.  One example is 2 Samuel 22:32, “For who is God besides the Lord? And who is the Rock except our God?”  And given that Jesus affirms everything in the Old Testament in this same Gospel (see Matthew 5:17-21) it is highly problematic that a “literal” reading of Scripture means Peter is the Rock of 16:18.

And just a few chapters later, as Christ is preparing His disciples for their mission after His departure He specifically states, “Let no man call you Father.” (Matthew 23:9).  And yet, Rome has more than 400,000 “Fathers” who claim to follow Christ.  And still more to the point, the Scriptures are very clear that no one is “holy” (Romans 3:10, Psalm 14:1-3, 53:1-3; Ecclesiastes 7:20).  And yet Rome calls the pope, “Holy Father.”

So a literal interpretation of the Scriptures is not friendly to Rome’s doctrines.

I am very grateful for the chance to interact with Joseph’s material and thank him for the invitation.  I am even more grateful for his interest in the Scriptures, for “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” (Romans 10:17).

Soli Deo Gloria.

[i] Fourth Session of the Council of Trent, Decree Concerning the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books, April 8, 1546.  See Schroeder,  H.J., O.P. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent; English Translation.  Charlotte, N.C.  Tan Books, 1978.  p. 19.   Nihil Obstat (1978 edition): Fr. Humbertus Kane, O.P. Fr. Alexius Driscoll, O.P.  Imprimi Potest (1978 edition): Fr. Petrus O’Brien, O.P. Prior Provincialis.  Nihil Obstat (1941): A. A. Esswein, Censor Deputatus.  Imprimatur (1941): Archbishop John J. Glennon.

What argument would be left for remaining Catholic?

23 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in Abortion, Pat Buchanan, Roman Catholicism, Trent

≈ 1 Comment

I have generally been a fan of Pat Buchanan for quite some time.  And I must confess to have voted for him in the Republican primaries back in the ‘90’s.  He seems to me to be a man of principle and a man who is willing to stand up for those principles.  Which is why I found this question which Pat asks in a recent Human Events article so interesting.

In that piece Pat is examining the stance of the new pope on several issues: redistribution of wealth, “social issues”, etc.  And Pat gives high marks to the new pope in these regards.  Pat pronounces that Pope Francis “adheres to orthodox teaching” which is important because, “To be Catholic is to be orthodox.”

But what, really, is Catholic orthodoxy?

Pat gives us his idea by antithesis:

…let us presume the impossible — that the Church should suddenly allow the ordination of [sic] woman, and decree that abortions in the first month of pregnancy are now licit, and that homosexual unions, if for life, will henceforth be recognized and blessed. This would require the Church to admit that for 2,000 years it had been in error on matters of faith and morals, and hence is not infallible.

But we have shown here that the Church of Rome has historically held a contrary position on abortion.  In that article, we noted that St. Jerome had no problem with “abortions in the first month of pregnancy” nor did Aquinas nor did Pope Innocent III nor did the very Council of Trent!  Think of that, friends.  What Pat Buchanan decries as heterodox was actually Catholic orthodoxy for at least fifteen hundred years!

My point then is not so much that the Roman Catholic Church was wrong before Trent or that it has been wrong after it.  But rather that it was necessarily wrong during at least one of those periods.  And according to Mr. Buchanan that “requires” Rome to admit that “it had been in error on matters of faith and morals, and hence is not infallible.”

Since we have objective, verifiable historic proof that Rome is not, indeed, infallible Buchanan’s question stands:  What argument would be left for remaining Catholic?

I can’t think of one.

Soli Deo Gloria.

 

Scriptures, the Mass and the RC IP

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Bryan Cross, C2C IP, Reformation, Roman Catholicism, Trent, Unity

≈ 1 Comment

The concept of the Roman Catholic Interpretive Paradigm has intrigued me.  If true, it would solve the age old epistemological dilemma of “How do you know?” and “How do you know that you know?”  Such certainty might be a welcome relief in a world filled with uncertainty.

But the last time we were together we observed how the greater the Magisterial influence the less likely is Scripture to be present.  We noted that in the Papal States – that government completely and directly under the control of the Magisterium – bibles were regularly and ceremonially burned and the mere mention of a biblical story was cause for the banishment of a play.  We also discovered that no bibles were printed in the vernacular of the Papal States for something more than 200 years.  And this against a background of a wider Catholic church whose other segments – like the northern European Catholic churches – relied on the Bible for their very survival.  Apparently the great dioceses of Cologne, Mainz, Frankfurt, etc. were not aware of a magisterial IP.

Against this backdrop, a good Roman Catholic might well respond that our analysis, while correct, is not complete.  You see, the Catholics have institutionalized Scripture reading at the Mass.  And our Roman Catholic friend would be quite right.  For those of you not familiar, the Catholic Mass has three readings: a First and Second Reading and then a reading from the Gospels.  In between the First and Second one of the Psalms is usually sung or spoken in a responsive manner (at least part of one).  So the Scriptures are built into the normal practice of the Catholic religion.  That’s true.

In fact, that was a practice codified very early on by Rome.  In order to compensate for the lack of education of parish priests, Rome assembled and disseminated a playbook for the Mass – the Roman Missal.  The Missal contains the Scripture readings, prayers and other rituals to be performed based on the day of the year and the type of celebration.  The Missal was designed to repeat after a three year cycle and I believe that it was, for the time, a very good thing.

But here’s the question.  How do you get through the 73 books of the (Catholic) canon in what amounts to 156 Sundays?  If you were to get through it all, you would have to cover approximately one half of each Biblical book each Sunday.  While that might not be problematic for 1st, 2nd or 3rd John or Jude, it would be a huge problem for Genesis or Isaiah, to take two examples.

So what was Rome’s solution?  Although it may sound harsh it is nonetheless true that the Magisterial solution was to eliminate the Old Testament.

Fr. Felix Just, S J, PhD, has done extensive research on the Scripture readings used in the Missals both before and after Vatican II.  Here is his analysis:

OT Comparison Felix Just

At the time after Trent the Roman Missal excluded nearly all of the Old Testament.  And while that has improved post-Vatican II, today’s Roman Catholic is exposed to only 13.5% of the Old Testament (excluding what Psalms are sung responsively) when s/he attends Mass.  (How Rome can evade the charge of institutionalized Marcionism is worth pondering.)

Here is Fr. Just’s analysis of the use of the New Testament:

Comparative Use of NT Texts in Roman Missal

(Source:  http://catholic-resources.org/Lectionary/Statistics.htm)

While the NT is certainly represented more fully than the OT, it is easy to see that today’s Roman Catholic still misses nearly 30% of it, if their only exposure is at the Mass.

Conclusion:

It is entirely unclear how the “Interpretive Paradigm” offered by C2C could have operated at all in the period between Trent and Vatican II.  And the reason for that is clear. As we have seen earlier, the Roman Church programmatically eliminated printed bibles from personal possession while it ceremonially eliminated 99% of the OT and 83% of the NT from its corporate worship.  How could any good Catholic have been expected to ask a question which might have been interpreted by the Magisterium when they had not the basic Scriptures about which to ask?

I am becoming more convinced as we go that this new “IP” from our friends at C2C is simply an anachronism.

Soli Deo Goria

How the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church Contradicts Called to Communion’s Interpretive Paradigm

18 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Bryan Cross, C2C IP, Reformation, Roman Catholicism, Trent

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The fellas over at Called to Communion (C2C) are behaving like young boys with a new bike.  And that new “bike” is what they describe as their “Interpretive Paradigm” (hereafter, IP).  Just as a shiny new bike makes a young lad feel superior to his friends – at least until the first scratch or dent – so the C2C crowd seems to feel around their new IP.  But the funny thing – it’s really not funny – is that this new IP actually contradicts the history of the Roman Catholic Church.  And in so doing puts C2C in a precarious position vis-à-vis their intention of shoring up belief in the Roman Communion.

What I will attempt here is to define this novel, new IP as described by C2C.  Then, in keeping with the theme of Reformation 500, I will apply this IP specifically to the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation.  What we will find is that not only did this IP not apply to Roman Catholics at that time, but the very subject matter intended to be scrutinized by the IP was systematically eradicated by Rome thereby making the IP worthless.  In other words, at the time of the Reformation the C2C paradigm would have had nothing to interpret.  We will also find that the IP used by the Roman Church in Italy was very different than that used by Roman Catholics in other parts of Europe which negates the very nature of the paradigm.

IP Defined

As nearly as I can tell, the C2C IP was born out of an analysis that Bryan Cross did with Neal Judisch on Keith Mathison’s book, “ The Shape of Sola Scriptura”.  You can read the whole thing here.  I believe an accurate reduction of the idea is this, in the words of the C2C authors:

The person becoming Catholic, by contrast, is seeking out the Church that Christ founded. He does this not by finding that group of persons who share his interpretation of Scripture. Rather, he locates in history those whom the Apostles appointed and authorized, observes what they say and do viz-a-viz the transmission of teaching and interpretive authority, traces that line of successive authorizations down through history to the present day to a living Magisterium, and then submits to what this present-day Magisterium is teaching. By finding the Magisterium, he finds something that has the divine authority to bind the conscience.

So there we have it.  The superiority of the Roman Catholic IP consists in the claim that,  1.) it can be located in history, 2.) it has divine authorization,  and 3.) it is consistent “through history”.  Fair enough.  C2C should be allowed to define its own terms and I hope I have been reasonable in my representation of them.

IP Tested

If we were to test this IP we would look for a laboratory that contained only those items needed by the IP but was free from any contaminants not needed by it.  And fortunately for us, history provides just such a laboratory – the Papal States.  The Papal States was a European country entirely under the control of the Roman church and its hierarchy.  It existed for 700 years until 1870 and was at its peak during the 16th century.  The Vatican exercised complete and total control over every aspect of life within those borders and therefore qualifies as the perfect laboratory to test the IP.  (And just to be clear, Bryan’s piece was in response to Dr. Mathison’s work on Scripture so we may confine our investigation thereto.)

Scripture in the Papal States

Implicit in the C2C IP is the availability of the Scriptures to every parishioner as is the case today.  That the Scriptures are available is the minimal requirement from which questions about Scripture can arise.  Today’s Roman Catholic has access to the Scriptures and to his/her priests and bishops in order to have their questions answered.  And that is what undergirds the C2C IP.  But such was not the case in the Papal States in the 16th century:

If an alert visitor from northern Europe tried to get to grips with the religious scene in Italy, one absence would be immediately obvious: there were no vernacular Bibles in the house of the laity.  Pope Paul V was perfectly serious when in 1606 he furiously confronted the Venetian ambassador with the rhetorical question ‘Do you not know that so much reading of Scripture ruins the Catholic religion?’[i]

I suppose that some may quibble over the phrase “so much reading of Scripture” but to the Supreme Pontiff of that day “so much” really meant “any”:

Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics; even literary versions of scriptural stories in drama or poetry were frowned on.  As a result, between 1567 and 1773, not a single edition of an Italian-language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula.[ii]

It is worth a moment to pause and reflect at this point.  The boys at C2C want us to believe that the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church is the only God-given instrument whereby Scriptures can be properly and authentically interpreted.  And yet in a place and time where the Roman Catholic Church reigned supreme not only did they not exercise their alleged responsibility, but they used their temporal power to eliminate the Scripture to the greatest extent possible.  If the Pontiff thinks that reading the Scripture is the “ruin” of the Catholic religion, it is risible to maintain that he would stand as the head of an organization charged with giving “the divinely inspired interpretation” of that same Scripture.  Unless, of course, that “divinely inspired interpretation” is the burning of the Bible!

Scripture in the rest of Europe

The second nail in the coffin of the C2C IP for the period under investigation is that there was no uniformity of doctrine within the Roman Catholic Church in Europe.  For those Catholics who lived in northern Europe and had to interact with biblically literate Protestants, the Roman doctrine would have meant ecclesial suicide:

Even a visitor from the Catholic parts of Germany would find this astonishing: there a ban on Bibles would have been highly dangerous to a Church constantly confronting biblically literate Protestants[iii].

And one wouldn’t have to go as far as Germany.  The Republic of Venice vigorously maintained an independent stance from Rome.  The Catholic Church of Venice was outspoken against the reforms of the Council of Trent, which obviously included the Roman version of the canon of Scripture.

Reflect with me for a moment.  In northern Europe the availability of and familiarity with the Scriptures was necessary to the continued existence of Roman Catholicism.  But where the Magisterium was most powerful, Scriptures were the “ruin” of the Catholic religion and no Bibles in the vernacular were printed for over 200 years!  How could it even be possible for a Roman Catholic parishioner to avail himself of this marvelous IP when he would not have access to the very thing about which question might have been asked?  That is very troubling, indeed.

In Conclusion

The IP being promoted by the C2C crowd fails all of its own criteria.  The first of which is historicity.  Our examination has shown that the Popes of the Papal States in Europe had not the slightest interest in interpreting the Scriptures.  The historical record is clear that Pope Paul V especially, was committed to the eradication of Scripture from his domain.  The claim that Rome or its Magisterium would have exercised any interpretive authority is null and void.

The second criteria placed on the C2C IP is its alleged divine authorization.  That claim cannot be supported by virtue of the fact that Rome was engaged in the destruction and eradication of the Scriptures which have been central to the Judeo Christian heritage for 3,000.  Further, the “divine” nature of the paradigm is called into question because it was not used in the majority of Roman Catholic churches throughout Europe.  Neither the Catholic churches in Venice , nor the Catholic churches in northern Europe nor the Catholic churches in Spain would have granted a divine aspect to anything Rome did.

And lastly, the obvious fact that the C2C IP differs so radically from the historical record of the Roman Catholic church negates the third attribute claimed for it.

We must necessarily conclude therefore, that the Interpretive Paradigm offered us by Bryan Cross and the folks at Called to Communion is an anachronism.  And an historical investigation shows that the IP fails to display any of the three criteria which its authors claim for it and is therefore to be disregarded.

Soli Deo Gloria

[i] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation.  New York: Penguin Books, 2003.  P. 406

[ii] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Op. cit.. P. 406

[iii] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Op. cit.. P. 406

Competing Uses of Nicaea by Roman Catholics and their Doctrine of the Church

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Bryan Cross, Reformation, Roman Catholicism, Trent, Unity

≈ 2 Comments

It was with great interest that I came across Bryan Cross’s rejoinder to  Mark Galli, the Managing Editor of Christianity Today  entitled “We don’t need no magisterium: A reply to Christianity Today‘s Mark Galli”  Mr. Galli was making his case that the Holy Spirit does not need a Magisterium.  Bryan, of course, rejects that idea.  But what caught my eye was Bryan’s use of the Council of Nicaea in defense of his position:

For example, the reason the Arians could not credibly claim that the Church had to go through a period of discernment to determine that the Holy Spirit was, in fact, teaching the Church that Arianism is true, that after the Nicene Council the Church continued only with those in the Arian tradition and that those persons who followed the decision of the Council were the heretics who were thereby separated from the Church, is precisely that the visible Church made this decision at that Council by way of the magisterium of bishops in communion with the episcopal successor of the Apostle Peter.

We should excuse Bryan the terrible run-on sentence and hope that he will make amends in the future but I take his meaning to be this:  the Arians at Nicaea were officially repudiated as a result of the decision of the unified “magisterium of bishops in communion with the episcopal successor of the Apostle Peter.”  In other words, it was Rome’s authority that saved the day.  Leaving aside the discussion about how the pope never attended the council and that his legates were minority figures there and the more important point that it was the secular emperor, Constantine, who ratified the whole thing the question I have is whether Catholics at the time of the Reformation would have come to the same conclusion using the same historical information.

And, indeed, they did not.

The largest population of “Catholics” at the time of the Reformation was the French.   The French church has a long and illustrious career in Christendom with well established structures and rituals.  So how would the French have interpreted the same data offered by Bryan?  Here is a fascinating excerpt:

A whole series of late sixteenth-century French historians drew their view of the relations between Church and Commonwealth from early fourth-century Rome, when Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and immediately took it upon himself to summon Councils to decide questions of Church doctrine and discipline:  they pointed out that after the baptism of King Clovis of the Franks, the same thing had happened in France.  This was not merely antiquarianism, as a representative splutter about the Council of Trent from the celebrated Gallican Catholic lawyer Charles du Moulin makes clear: ‘This new pretended Council has sought to deprive the King of France of his ancient honour by subjugating him and preferring another [the Pope] to him.  This other was elevated to his position long after the institution of the Crown of France, which delivered him from the pagans and the Saracens and installed the Catholic faith by means of the succours and victories of Charlemagne and the Franks.’”  [i]

Moulin, as a representative of the 16th century French “Catholic” church sees Nicaea as God’s institution of the King as His representative on earth.  God had historically established a secular ruler through which to administer His church and the inroads attempted by the Pope of Rome in this area were merely the bluster of a brash new upstart.

And this view is supported by the observations of the modern Roman Catholic historian, Paul Johnson:

In some (western European countries at the time of the Reformation) it is difficult to identify any period in which the papacy made successful inroads into royal control of the national church…  The sixth century councils the earliest examples of Church-State cooperation in Christian-barbarian Europe, show the Church acting virtually as a department of the State, and as essentially subordinate to it…In the fifteenth century, and still more in the sixteenth, the grip of the crown was tightened, as it was elsewhere in Europe, by formal concordats and agreements, which spelt out the respective rights of crown  and papacy in such a way as to make it clear that the state interest remained paramount.   The fact that Spanish-Hapsburg diplomatic and political policy might be, as a rule, in general alignment in its territories, with papal aims, or that the Spanish crown might be in full agreement with papal doctrinal positions, and enforce them in its territories, does not alter the absolute determination of the Spanish State to control the ecclesiastical scene – to the total exclusion of independent papal action.  The Spanish Inquisition was essentially an organ of royal power, one of whose functions was to ‘protect’ the Spanish Church from influence by outside agencies, including the papacy.  Hence the domination of the Church by the crown was perhaps more comprehensive in Spain during the sixteenth century than in any other Europe state, including those with a Protestant, Erastian system.  [ii]

According to Johnson, then, the correct view of the relation of Church and State for Catholics at the time of the Reformation is clearly that the former was subordinate to the latter.  Nobody looked to Rome for decisions on doctrine or ecclesiology and the Roman position held sway only in those cases where it happened to coincide with that of the secular ruler.

And this was the situation in Spain, as well:

The most fiercely devout of traditionalist Catholic monarchs, Philip II of Spain, was not going to yield any of his ancestors’ independence from direct papal interference in his dominions.  He was one of the first monarchs to implement the decrees of the Council of Trent; in fact he was so quick off the mark that he did so without waiting for the Pope to ratify them.  From the 1560’s the decrees were enacted through Spanish provincial councils convened by the King with Philip’s royal ‘observers’ in reality presiding over the proceedings, and whatever the King found difficult in the decrees he altered to suit himself.  In the same spirit, when Philip wished to introduce into the Spanish dominions the ‘Tridentine’ breviary newly authorized for the whole Catholic Church, he commissioned a local edition from Plantin, his official printer in Brussels, which made some deliberate minor alterations to get around the monopoly privilege granted to an Italian printer by the Pope.[iii]

The “fiercely devout” Catholic King of Spain had not the slightest idea that the Pope of Rome was the head of a Magisterium which could decide issues for local parishioners.  And in an even more interesting tidbit, the Spanish Inquisition actually banned the works of Ignatius of Loyola because his system deviated from the official Spanish style and possibly because of his allegiance to the pope.

But here we come to the interesting point.  How are Catholics today to resolve the obvious contradiction between what Bryan Cross thinks the Magisterium is and how Catholics in the 16th century viewed it?

If we adopt Bryan’s view, we look to the Magisterium defined as the pope of Rome and the bishops in communion with him.  But that system did not exist at all during the Reformation.  The bishops of each country were beholden to their sovereign leader, not the pope.

And could – or would – the modern Magisterium say that its functions did not exist just 500 years ago in the manner they do today?

So the irony is that Bryan Cross actually proves Mark Galli’s thesis.  The “Catholic” church at the time of the Reformation did not, in fact, need a magisterium as defined by Bryan.  And that is obvious because the Church existed and the Magisterium did not.

We don’t need no magisterium – indeed.

Soli Deo Gloria

[i] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation.  New York: Penguin Books, 2003.  P. 321

[ii] Johnson, Paul. A History of Christianity.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.  P. 217

[iii] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Op. cit..  pp. 320-321

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

≈ 1 Comment

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