You need to stop blowing smoke out of your posterior and learn the terms involved here before posting again.

or
there's an aspect of the condemnation of 1616 that you don't understand.

Oh, so you found one instance from a non-irreformable decree of the Holy Office.  People argue that heliocentrism vs. geocentrism has no bearing on the good of souls.  So, then, how does this harm souls?  In addition, while it may have been true that Heliocentrism would pose a danger and a scandal to souls in 1616, perhaps by 1835 it posed no such threat.

In any case, we're not talking here about a verdict here or there by the Holy Office, or some offhand comment in a Papal Allocution.  What's protected by the Holy Spirit is the UNIVERSAL Magisterium, when the Pope teaches and addresses the entire Church or promulgates discipline to the entire Church.

The other day I looked at the most recent 5 pages of that thread and it seemed to be a poster named "poche" talking to himself. I figured it was similar to a "graceseeker " thread and moved on.

My post was in answer to 'Now we're talking. Where has the Church given us evil, even in non-infallible circuмstances? There is no precedent.'

The 1616 decree was an irreversible decree. A 'non-irreformable' decree is reformable. How in God's name can formal heresy become reformable?

'People argue'... I thought we were talking about the Church here, not 'people's opinions... 'that heliocentrism vs. geocentrism has no bearing on the good of souls.' It harms souls in that the Church decreed the Bible, the word of God, said the sun moves, and to deny what God has revealed is what the danger was/is. Moreover, For hundreds of years the Fathers had fought the Pythagorean heresies attached to the heliocentric heresy. These heresies entered the Church once again when that infamous U-turn by popes occurred. Once indulged, Modernism followed as a direct result of the heliocentric heresy. The first evolutionary theory was the Nebular theory, how a heliocentric solar system evolved WITHOUT GOD. There followed Darwin Evolution, when MILLIONS OF SOULS ceased to believe in God. With the backing of both CHURCH and STATE, heliocentrism eliminated God from His creation for most. Why even trad Catholics today believe in theistic evolution, no different to atheistic evolution in that both reject direct creation by God.

There is another way in which the HvG hasd a bearing on souls. Once conceded to biblical and physical heliocentrism, you cannot have one without the other, the Church allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry to decide what was or is a teaching of the Church. In 1820, the Holy Office admitted the 1616 decree was papal, was infallible, and remained a heresy. Here the Holy Ghost put His foot down making sure that the universal magisterium of Pope Paul V was protected. But the heliocentrists found a way around this so as to have their infallible decree defining heliocentrism as formal heresy AND AN ORTHODOX HELIOCENTRISM FROM 1835 ONWARDS.

It surprises me not one bit now when I find post after post, quoting pope after pope, saint after saint, theologian after theologian, contradicting one another on so many things to do with Catholicism. One pope says this cannot be alterted, Vatican I said no pope can alter what a previous pope said, yet popes since 1835 have been doing this, especially since Vatican II, and then posters quote where someone said it can in this case or that case be alterted, giving another reason for it.

 There has been so many contradictions in Church history since 1835 that a Catholic today would find it hard to know exactly how the Church works any more. When no answer can be found we get the likes of the post I got above 'or there's an aspect of the condemnation of 1616 that you don't understand.' Well tell us then, I thought we were supposed to know how out faith works?

Its a while now since I bothered to listen to ten theologians differ on any aspect of the Catholic faith. I read Pope Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger deny Original Sin was as a result of Adam and Eve in his Big Bang heliocentric book In the Beginning, that it is a 'collective sin' and the next pope Francis saying he would baptise a Martian if he arrived on Earth, as though a Martian needed baptism. That is what Catholicism has become since that harmless heliocentrism was brought into the womb of the Church, as Church with a MILLION OPINIONS. Just look at this thread.

They say geocentrism has no bearing on the individual soul. Well it has on mine, for I have come to really appreciate the FIRST DOGMA OF THE CHURCH found in OTT's history of Catholic dogmas, namely GOD CAN BE KNOWN FROM THE THINGS THAT HE MADE. It was that heliocentrism brought into the Church from 1835 that led to the elimination of this dogma.  I now find God in every beautiful thing in nature and the universe. Every cloud or star reminds me of His creation, every flower reminds me of His infinite beauty. And then I read for the last 200 years Toms, Dicks and Harrys tellingus geocentrism is not true or has no spiritual value.

Thank God, I know my faith, what I must believe in, what I must do if I am to have any chance of heaven.

Cassini,

Enjoyed your post and your point it well taken.  Those that keep Dogma in its proper order of reference will have the last and only laugh.

I hope you have not pushed some S&Sers to think we have had no pope since 1835.

Drew

Drew, nominalist "universals" have absolutely no relation whatsoever to Universal in the Church ... other than a similar etymology.

When you introduce a time element, what you're essentially saying is that the Church can defect at any given time.

Foundational to this question concerning God’s love for us is another. Does this love of God for man entail that He endowed man with the ability and faculties to know Him and to come to Him? Did God create us in such a way as to make knowledge of Him something that is fully natural to the human mind and heart? If not, then it would seem that man has some justification for not knowing and loving God, and that any judgment of God upon us for not knowing and worshipping Him in spirit and truth would be the act of a capricious and unjust tyrant. Implicitly responding to this question, St. Paul writes:
 

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.” (Rom 1:18-20).

 
St. Thomas writes, “all knowers know God implicitly in all they know.” (De Veritate, Q. 22, a.2). Thomas rightly teaches, of course, that all of our knowledge, barring a direct infusion from God, comes through the senses. We come into this world with no innate ideas or knowledge, and this includes no knowledge of God. The “natural” knowledge of God of which Thomas speaks is therefore acquired through the encounter of man’s mind with the world, and through sense experience. It is, in other words, natural, but not innate.
 
But there is a very important truth involved here which I think is often missed. The human mind, in order to posses such “natural knowledge” of God, must be in possession of an innate, intellectual light which is structured in such a manner as to know, in a finite and analogical manner, as God knows. St. Thomas writes:

“And thus we must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types.” (I, 84, 5).

This created participation by the human intellect in the uncreated intellectual light of God operates in response to both areas of human knowledge – natural and supernatural. The passage from St. Thomas quoted immediately above speaks of this light as specifically related to our knowledge of created things. Simply put, God sees the substance known as man and man sees likewise; God sees a tree, man sees a tree. Man, in other words, does not just know the “units” of individual sense data, but his intellect is so constituted by God so as to immediately abstract to the knowledge of the substantial nature of things. Man naturally knows “universals,” which are the “eternal types” (the “kinds” of Genesis) of God’s creation. The very foundation of all intellectual sanity, therefore, is man’s knowledge of “abstractions” which the modern-day empiricist dismisses as mere human fabrications.
 
But what about God and the supernatural truths which constitute His very Being? Does the created structure of the intellectual light within us also possess a structure which “naturally” responds to supernatural truths? Did God so constitute a relationship between Himself and our own minds as to make it a fully natural thing for us to “hear” the voice of Revelation, even though the truths involved may be quite abstract and even appear to involve things that are contradictory to previous experience and thought?
 
A remarkable explanation of this relationship is available to us in the writings of Newman’s contemporary and alleged arch-rival, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning. His work, The Glories of the Sacred Heart, contains a chapter titled “Dogma the Source of Devotion.” After quoting Our Lord’s words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Cardinal Manning offers the following analysis (selected quotes):
 
“He (Jesus) declared that all truth was contained in Himself; and when the Apostle said that he judged himself to ‘know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified,” he meant the same thing, namely, that he who knows Jesus Christ aright knows the whole Revelation of God, the radiance which flows from the Person of Jesus Christ.”

“Now our Divine Lord, speaking to the woman of Samaria, said, ‘You adore that which you know not,’ because they were an idolatrous people, of mixed race…and they had a sort of fragmentary knowledge of the old revelation; but they did not rightly know the True God; and so much as they did know of the True God, they did not know truly. Therefore they could not worship Him ‘in spirit and in truth.’”

“From these words I draw one conclusion, namely, that knowledge is the first and vital condition of all true worship.”
 
“My purpose, then, will be to trace out the connection between what the world scornfully calls dogma and devotion, or the worship of God ‘in spirit and in truth.’”
 
“Now, first of all, let us see what is dogma….It means the precise enunciation of a divine truth, of a divine fact, or of a divine reality fully known, so far as it is the will of God to reveal it, adequately defined in words chosen and sanctioned by a divine authority.”
 
“Every divine truth or reality, so far as God has been pleased to reveal it to us, casts its perfect outline and image upon the human intelligence. His own mind, in which dwells all truth in all fullness and in all perfection, so far as He has revealed of His truth, is cast upon the surface of our mind, in the same way as the sun casts its own image upon the surface of the water, and the disc of the sun is perfectly reflected from its surface.”
 
Dogmas or doctrines, in other words, are not in any way to be regarded as weak and humanly fabricated “notions” (the word used by Cardinal Newman for such intellectual formulations), but rather as a powerful divine radiance cast upon our intellectual light, a radiance which finds a natural response in the soul of one who sincerely seeks the truth. This is why, in Cardinal Manning’s words:
 
“If when a divine truth is declared to us, our hearts do not turn to it, as the eye turns to the light; if there be not is us an instinctive yearning, which makes us promptly turn to the sound of the divine voice, the fault is in our hearts; for just in proportion as we know the truth we shall be drawn towards it.”
 
Finally, I cannot resist offering one more marvelous passage taken from Manning’s work, The Four Great
 
Evils of Our Day:
“God, who is the perfect and infinite intelligence – that is, the infinite and perfect reason – created man to His own likeness, and gave him a reasonable intelligence, like His own. As the face in the mirror answers to the face of the beholder, so the intelligence of man answers to the intelligence of God. It is His own likeness.”
 
Cardinal Manning’s words constitute a beautiful elaboration of Our Lord’s simple declaration, “Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice.” (John 18:37). It should be added that the Gospel of John is replete with teachings concerning the nature of Christ as the light of truth, and of man’s response, or lack of response to this light and truth: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” I would highly recommend to all readers that they reread the entire Gospel of St. John with the specific intent of noting all of this imagery concerning the power of the light and truth of Christ which finds a fully natural response in the created intellectual light of man, and a corresponding rejection in those who have of their own free will obscured this light: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” And further:

“For everyone that doth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. But he that doth truth, cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God.” (John 3:20-21).
 
It is no wonder, therefore, that the Gospel of John is a premier object for deconstruction by Modernists. It firmly establishes Dogma and the Divine Deposit of Faith (the “radiance” emanating from Christ) as the absolute and vital foundation of our entire Faith, as being the light of truth which is the very life of the soul, and to which the human soul naturally responds. God’s love is thus fully justified. All the blame for man’s turning away from the light of God’s truth lies within the will of each individual man who does so. As Cardinal Manning said, “the fault is within our hearts.”
 
It must also be added that Christ’s words are for all men at all times. The light of Christ’s truth is not something that must wait upon the growth and maturation of man’s experience and intellectual and religious evolution. It is there to be received and assented to by any human heart, at any time and in any culture, which has not betrayed its own inherent, God-given light.
 
Dogmas, in other words, are not simply abstract formulations which comprise a “notional” faith. They are not merely confessions of Faith designed to bind us together in a unity of belief and worship. They are the very vitality of the entire spiritual life. St. Thomas saw fit to treat of the “Nature of Sacred Doctrine” in the very first Question of his Summa. There, he writes:
 
“On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. Xiv, 1), to this science [Sacred Doctrine] alone belongs that whereby saving faith is begotten, nourished, protected and strengthened.”
 
This begetting, nourishing, protecting, and strengthening of our faith is, of course, intimately incarnated into all our other faculties. Sensations, life experiences, and the imagining and memory faculties all play very important parts. But it is the intellectual light in man which is created with the structure – this structure involving abstraction at its most sublime level – to transform all these experiences into true knowledge of God and of His revealed truth. Here lies the real vitality of man, even of the most simple and unlearned of men, and here is where man “hears” the voice of God.
 
Such is true Catholic epistemology. To undermine it in any way is to enter upon a path of decay involving all things human.