For another thing, if the Pope is saying that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral, then he would be effectively saying – whether consciously or unconsciously – that previous popes, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and even divinely inspired Scripture are in error. If this is what he is saying, then he would be attempting to “make known some new doctrine,” which the First Vatican Council expressly forbids a pope from doing. He would, contrary to the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, be “proclaim[ing] his own ideas” rather than “bind[ing] himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word.” He would be joining that very small company of popes who have flirted with doctrinal error. And he would be undermining the credibility of the entire Magisterium of the Church, including his own credibility. For if the Church has been that wrong for that long about something that serious, why should we trust anything else she teaches? And if all previous popes have been so badly mistaken about something so important, why should we think Pope Francis is right?
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2017/10/15/the-popes-remarks-on-capital-punishment-need-to-be-clarified/
That was before Francis made it official by rewriting the Catechism.
> For if the Church has been that wrong for that long about something that serious, why should we trust anything else she teaches?
ReplyDeleteTrust is a valid issue, but logically, for the serious Catholic, the crisis is much worse.
If the Roman Church is the final authority on all matters on which it speaks then, logically, that church *must* be inerrant. If it were to promulgate detectable errors, then any other source that declared the truth on that matter (any matter) would be a higher authority on that matter... ergo there is at least one matter on which Rome is a lower authority.
Therefore, if there is *any* doctrinal matter on which Rome is mistaken, then the conclusion that Rome is not the final authority on all such matters must follow.
Note that when Catholic apologists seek refuge in the statement that Rome is only inerrant with she speaks authoritatively, this is, by the same demonstration, an empty tautology - unless it is conceded that 1) she does not always thus speak, and that 2) there is no possible way to know when she is thus speaking, thus reducing the value of the claim to no more than the claim that my Aunt is also the highest possible authority on an unknown list of spiritual matters in which she unknowably speaks with that authority.
The same syllogism also demonstrates that the claim that the Bible an be the highest authority on all matters on which it speaks, without being inerrant, is logically incoherent.
His blog will address it soon.
ReplyDeleteWas that what the (goalpost) removal men were driving towards his house for? We'll see.
DeleteI wrote the following over at CARM regarding this:
ReplyDeleteSo, in continuing to mine this subject I believe that Catholics are going to have a real problem on their hands as the discontinuity of this teaching receives more analysis.
Consider the following from Edward Feser (from a March 2018 blog post: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/03/bellarmine-on-capital-punishment.html)
Here he provides an analysis of Bellarmine's (a Doctor of the Church) position regarding capital punishment.
Feser:
"A lot could be said about Bellarmine’s various lines of argument, but for the moment I will focus on just two points. (In what follows I quote from the Stefania Tutino translation of De Laicis in the new Liberty Fund volume of Bellarmine’s political writings.)
Absolute opposition to capital punishment is heretical
Early in De Laicis, Bellarmine makes the following striking remark:
Among the chief heretical beliefs of the Anabaptists and Antitrinitarians of our time there is one that says that it is not lawful for Christians to hold magistracy and that among Christians there must not be power of capital punishment, etc., in any government, tribunal, or court. (p. 5, emphasis added)"
There's more, lots more. But, the following will have to suffice:
Feser:
"So, to dismiss Bellarmine on this issue is to claim that a Doctor of the Church who specialized in such matters – not to mention all the other authorities he cites, and the centuries-old teaching of the Church – got it wrong, and that the heretics he opposed were right all along.
I submit that this is not possible if the claims the Catholic Church makes about her own authority are true. There are cases in Church history where a teaching once regarded as optional was later regarded as a requirement of orthodoxy. But there is no case where a teaching once regarded as heretical was later regarded as orthodox. And it would be a major problem if there were such a case, given what the Church claims about the reliability of the ordinary magisterium. (And no, slavery and religious liberty are not counterexamples.)"
Having already staked out a position by virtue of his studies of Church History on the subject and written extensively against a change of teaching (or "development" if you please) on numerous occasions, Feser must now find himself in a particularly thorny position, and I'm certain that he is not alone there. The exact circumstance that he had warned would be "a major problem" has now come to pass. I don't see a clear way for him to reconcile what he knows, what he believes, and what he has now seen. I suspect he does not either, but time will tell.
For what it’s worth, I think Rome may have been over the last period of time moving away from Bellarmine. He was a hammer during the Reformation, but you don’t see Rome trotting him out any time in the 20th century. He may not be a standard of “Roman Catholic Teaching”.
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DeleteI'm sure you're right, John. So, Bellarmine and other Doctors of the Church are deferred to in principle but not in practice. Trotted out when it serves the purposes of the liberal establishment and ignored the rest of the time.
DeleteThis sets up a tension in Catholicism while the establishment continues to veer left and a significant portion of the laity, like Feser and others aware of the history of the teachings attempt to "stay in place". Like a building with a sinking foundation, a crack has formed which is visible to the inhabitants. Now what?
The clearest way out for Feser is to denounce Francis as a heretic or to hope that Francis withdraws his proposed change to the Catechism. Again, we'll see what happens.
ReplyDeleteSome of my conservative Catholic friends must have started wearing sackcloth and ashes by now. I would have, had I continued to be a part of this hopelessly afflicted church.
ReplyDeleteThis leftist pope is not yet done with his damage. He has many more years left...
ReplyDeleteI do not doubt for a second that the pope will soon be changing Romish dogma on issues such as homosexuality or even Purgatory. So much for papal infallibility. How can Catholic "sacred tradition" be a valid source of divine authority when it is constantly changing, affirming contradictory stances?
ReplyDelete