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Author Topic: Since when does being Catholic require a canon law/theology/history degree?  (Read 59667 times)

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Offline Soubirous

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[...]
My question is simpler and harder: why should I trust my own (or your) judgment on this? What authority do I actually have to make that call? [...]
Isn't the Church supposed to be the place where ordinary people can be comfortable - not in the sense of lazy, but in the sense of trusting? Didn't St. Ignatius say something like we should hold that white is black if the Church says so? That's a pretty high bar of trust.

The answer is also both simpler and harder.

If I don't prioritize sorting out my own soul and my own interior life, then the particular trad faction I chose becomes no more than a Sunday bandwagon. I can't blame the fallout of V2 nor the recent/current occupants of the Vatican for my failings before God, which only He and I truly know. I can't credit my own reason, conscience, and personal discernment for the days that appear to be temporally or spiritually successful, because I must recognize that any good that I may do happens only through freely accepting/not resisting the grace of God. I can't come to the "right" conclusions about anything if I neglect my prayers and daily duties of state.

Of course it's helpful to look around sometimes and ask these exact questions that you're asking, if only as a corrective to stay away from bandwagons and externalizing blame. We know how messed up things are. (More likely, and mercifully, we have no idea just how messed up, that would lead us to despair.) But forefronting that sort of knowledge will do us zero good, individually, towards final perseverence and Particular Judgment. 

Instead, trust fully in God in each moment, ask often for the help of the Holy Ghost and Our Blessed Mother, and these questions will fall away like dust. IYKYK.

Offline Ladislaus

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So, I've long pointed this out regarding the theological debates among the various Tradtional groups, or even between conserva-Conciliar types in the Novus Ordo, that God Himself, the Holy Ghost, told us through Sacred Scripture that God reveals to the humble and lowly that which He witholds from the wise.

When I first became a Traditional Catholic, there was no analysis of Vatican II and its error, no syllogisms involved, and nothing even close to that.  I had been very poorly catechized in the Conciliar Church and was beginning to just learn on my own.  During my first year at University, attempting to deprogram from Jesuit education (both High School and University, St. Ignatius High in Cleveland and Loyola U in Chicago), before going home for Christmas, during my frequent Saturday morining walks around the area of Chicago where the "Lake Shore" campus was, I stopped into a religious / Catholic(?) book store thinking I'd get a Christmas gift for my parents.  On Saturday mornings, when i didn't have any classes scheduled, I would walk around the Chicago neighborhoods and was stunned by finding, almost every other block, one Catholic church that was simply more beautiful than the next, and thinking that it would cost many millions of dollars to build these today, if we even had the skills left to do it.  I could easily hit a dozen churches in a couple hours on foot.  In any case, I had stopped into the bookstore on one of my walks, and was browsing, and so I saw a book "The Glories of Mary", by St. Alphonsus, and I figured that at the very least it can't be bad since it had been written by a saint.  And I also picked up a copy for myself.

After I went back to school, I began reading the book, and gradually, over time, the realization began to hit me that ... what this man is describing and the faith that every page of the text exudes is completely alien to anything I had ever experienced in the Conciliar Church, i.e where the realization grew that St. Alphonsus was of a different religion than nearly the entire Conciliar Church.  So, even though that wasn't actually mentioned in the book, simply reading it and imbibing his devotion, inspired me to kneel when receiving Holy Communion at the Novus Ordo Mass.  There were some priests who reprimanded me and told me to stand up before they would give me Holy Communion, or, rather, what I thought at the time was Holy Communion.

I called home one weekend and my mother mentioned that she had also started kneeling for Holy Communion, on account of reading the same book, and then the entire family started doing it also, until at one point the priest at the Novus Ordo parish to which we belonged called us in to reprimand us about "this kneeling business".  That man was a total faithless apostate ... but that's for another time (I could go on about him for days ... but he clearly didn't believe in the Real Presence).  At that point, I think we all had had enough of the Novus Ordo, and my family started going to Immaculate Heart of Mary and I to the SSPX chapel in Chicago (then in a rented hotel hall each Sunday).  No "theologizing" needed.

We simply, by God's grace, had our "sensus Catholicus" stimulated, and the only reasoning necessary was "Sesame Street" level logic of "which of these things is not like the other?"  Our Lord told us that His sheep know Him and hear His voice.  We simply know, by faith, that Bergoglio, Prevost, or any of them ... are NOT speaking with the voice of the Shepherd.  That's all that's necesary, and God will reveal to the simple what He withholds from the learned and wise.

Now, there are in fact some very crucial points in the SV vs. R&R debate that really speak to the core of what it means to be Catholic, but even those are issues above any of the minutiae of theologcal argument and can be discerned quite clearly without any deep theological knowledge.

We don't see Our Lord laying down syllogisms in the Gospels, and His teaching has such a profundity that a single sentence of His can result in hundreds of pages in a scholastic theology manual just unwinding its meaning.


As the last two posts said, getting right with God is the first priority, you never wanna end up looking kinda like this :laugh2::laugh2:


But how do you know what Masses and sacraments are valid? how do you know what is the true, what unadulterated the truths of faith are, and if a priest is or is not a real priest? How do you know what is required for a priest to be validly ordained? 

You roll up the sleeves, study, and start asking questions. That's about it.

Offline Ladislaus

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But how do you know what Masses and sacraments are valid? how do you know what is the true, what unadulterated the truths of faith are, and if a priest is or is not a real priest? How do you know what is required for a priest to be validly ordained? 

If you can't reason through it own, and you're not necessarily required to if you don't have the ability to do so, then you just pray and ask God to lead you to valid priests and valid Sacraments.  He will not refuse such prayers offered in sincerity, since Our Lord taught that even we who are evil will not give our children a stone if they ask for bread.  As for "unadulterated truths" of the faith, I think some groups have to get off their high horses in pretending that their conclusions are "of faith".  Theological bickering can occur all within the confines of what Holy Mother Church has defined and taught.  For the average person, if you are not inspired to think past it, simply knowing the Catechism suffices, along with the formal intention to believe everything that the Church (actually) teaches [not something that one or another Trad group "hallucinates" (an AI term that's rather aprorpos here).

In the entire world of Trad controversy, there are really only two issues that touch upon the faith, and where some Trads are slouching toward Old Catholicism, where you attribute the evils of the Conciliar Church to the Catholic Church.  You're better off in a "sede-doubtist" stance, saying, "I don't know.  It's above me to figure it out."  There are alternatives to dogmatic R&Rism (which +Lefebvre did not ahere to despite how hard some modern dogmatic try to pretend he did), but where he actually agreed that the Pope is guided and protected by the Holy Ghost and cannot do these things.  +Lefebvre unequivocally affirmed that proposition, and if you doubt this, that's where you're going off the rails into heresy.  Now, the reason he did not publicly (at least) come out as a sedevacantist was because he realized that the SV syllogims had some minors that dogmatic SVs ignore, such as ... could one or another of these putative popes be under duress (control, blackmail, etc.) where their acts wouldn't be free acts and therefore null and void.  Father Chazal has an impoundist position that's perfectly Catholic.  Key is that we cannot attribute these grave evils to the Magisterium and the papally-approved Universal Discipline (Mass, Canon Law, etc.) of the Church, since that would be tantamount to asserting that the Church had in fact defected.

Now, the other key dogma is EENS, "Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus", "no salvation outside the Church".  While the Church has long tolerated the opinion that there can be a Baptism of Desire, and within strict limits, BoD doesn't have to be fatal to Catholic ecclesiology, but if you extend BoD outside of catechumens and the like, i.e. to Prots, Orthodox (an absurdity of course since they are validly baptized), and even infidels like Jews, Muslims, and "Hindus in Tibet" (+Fellay-ite nonsense, since there aren't any Hindus in Tibet, or at most one or two lone wolves) ... once you say that those can be saved, you have a monumental problem for Catholic ecclesiology.  Once those are to be considered able to be saved (obviously without converting, since anyone can be converted), then since there's absolutely no salvation outside the Church, you must say they were somehow in the Church, anonymously, without knowing it ... and most Trad clergy adhere to "Anonymous Catholic" soteriology.  If you do that, then Vatican II's ecclesiology, that most Trads denounce as heretical, ceases to be problematic, and the Trads who believe that non-Catholics can be saved have no business rejecting V2 ecclesiology.

But those are the two pivotal issues that are in fact of faith ...

1) the degree to which the Cathoilc Church can officially promulgate evil (teaching, universal discipline)
2) EENS and ecclesiology

dogmatic R&R run afoul of #1 and have become thinly-veiled Old Catholics

99% of Trad clergy believe that non-Catholics can be saved, and most believe that even infidels can be saved ... and thus have no business rejecting V2 ecclesiology