Notes: Friday, August 6, 2010

Fr. Donovan on conscience and predestination

http://www.catholica.com.au/gc2/dd/024_dd_020810.php

The Rev. Fr. Daniel Donovan writes that

Predestination teaches that God has pre-ordained those who will be saved and those who will be condemned and the individual cannot alter his/her fate. Needless to say, Catholic teaching has always condemned any form of predestination as heresy.

In fact it is Fr. Donovan who is in error here. The correct teaching is that the Elect are indeed predestined, while the Damned are reprobated (see The Catholic Encyclopedia's article "Predestination" and Dz. 316, 320-22, and 348). It's disturbing to see this kind of doctrinal illiteracy from a priest and "former lecturer in religious education".

Fr. Donovan's understanding of conscience also leaves much to be desired. For the process of decisions of conscience he gives a convoluted and verbose eight-stage sequence, when the process is really quite simple. Judgements of conscience are acts of the intellect, so the process is the simple three-stage one by which the minor premise is referred to a major premise, from which is inferred the conclusion. In the case of moral reasoning, the major premise gives some law commanding, forbidding, or permitting certain acts, the minor premise is the fact of whether the act under consideration is one of those acts, and the conclusion is the judgement of whether the act under consideration is therefore commanded, forbidden, or permitted.

There are other problems with Fr. Donovan's article but I don't have time to go into them all here.

More from Mr. Coyne on "Home Masses"

At the Catholica forum:

I don't know if you'd call it a "house church" but we've been thinking of running an ad up here in the Blue Mountains for a while to see if we might find a few like-minded people to get together occasionally for a simple meal, a bit of prayer and reflection, and basically just seeing if we can form some sort of community to explore this further. I do know of a few established small groups around Australia that follow and pass around amongst themselves some of the commentaries from Catholica. I pick up a sense that there is a hunger for "small communities" (as opposed to the "big communities" of a parish). I have really fond memories of the Home Masses and many inter-Church get togethers I was involved with when I was active in the Hawthorn parish in Victoria in the 1970s.
[my emphasis,
http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=52936]

It amuses me how those of Mr. Coyne's ilk will berate Traditionalists for wanting to 'turn the clock back' when the 'ageing-hippie'-types themselves want to relive a bygone era. (For more on Mr. Coyne's religious opinions, see this Catholica Forum thread, where he writes that

Ultimately I think I am searching for "truth". I'm not searching for "authority figures" who provide me with some kind of emotional comfort. I sincerely want to know what the truth is — about the meaning of my life, what is the end objective of my life, is Jesus the one 'with all the answers', on what 'authority' we can have confidence in his answers.

and

There are things in that which I can agree with and other things I disagree with or I am sceptical about. For example I am not sure that Jesus founded Christianity, or was intending to found "a church", or "the church" which subsequently came to bear his name. From your own commentaries on Catholica I am more of the view today that Christianity as it came to be known was founded more by Paul and Peter and their disciples and, importantly, the "tension" between the contrasting perspectives put forward by Paul and Peter and their disciples. Certainly they and their disciples each drew their inspiration from Jesus but as you yourself have pointed out despite the common source for the inspiration they came up with ways of understanding, and implementing, the Jesus' message that were at times in complete opposition or at least deep contrast.

and

I am particularly interested in seeing what Vynette has to say from her explorations of what view Jesus had of himself concerning his divinity. My own view is that Jesus had no concept of "the Trinity" as that concept was subsequently developed or in the way many Christians think of that concept today. I don't believe though that that invalidates either Jesus or the concept of a Trinitarian God. Jesus certainly "planted the seeds" for the subsequent Trinitarian picture of the Godhead that emerged with his differentiations between himself and "my Father in heaven" and the spirit that would remain after he had gone. Was his view though as "theologically elaborate" as what was subsequently developed by the later Church Fathers?

and most strikingly:

As I argued in another post my sense is that the Jesus we are invited to worship and follow is something much greater than the mere historical figure.

Recall condemned error no. 29 of Lamentabili, the anti-Modernist syllabus:

It may be conceded that the Christ whom history presents, is far inferior to the Christ who is the object of faith.
[http://www.catecheticsonline.com/SourcesofDogma21.php]

Mr. Gooley on Scripture, liturgy, and the Traditional Latin Mass

http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=3&subclassID=75&articleID=7228&class=Features&subclass=Bite-size Vatican II

The Rev. Anthony Gooley, a deacon in The Archdiocese of Brisbane, writes that

“The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since, especially in the sacred liturgy, she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life from the table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body” (Dei Verbum 21).

This is such a profound image of the two tables yet the truth of it has been obscured historically by the use of Latin and the narrower selection of texts used in the pre-Vatican II liturgy.

The faithful did not receive enough from the table of the word.
[my emphasis]

In other words, for Mr. Gooley, the Traditional Latin Mass deprives the Faithful of a due good. Which makes the T.L.M. ... evil, I take it? But I would contend that it is the T.L.M, not the N.O.M., which leaves the Faithful better acquainted with Scripture anyway. Towards the end of his article Mr. Gooley ask a few rhetorical questions:

To what extent are ordinary Catholics familiar with the Scriptures and use them for daily prayer?

Are Catholics immersed in the Scriptures and more able to meditate on them and read them with confidence?

Is there a repertoire of Biblical texts which Catholics know by heart as they know familiar traditional prayers or the responses at Mass?

Yet by having three readings each Sunday, with a three-year cycle for those readings, the N.O.M. guarantees that only those Catholics who go out of their way to memorise parts of the Bible will be the ones to know much, or even any, of it by heart, not to mention the N.O.M.'s suppression of the Last Gospel.

And Mr. Gooley uses an odd comparison at one point:

We can find in Scripture proclaimed in liturgy food for our spiritual nourishment just as we receive food from the Eucharist to transform us into the Body of Christ.

But hearing Scripture readings produces its effects in us in quite a different way to that in which Holy Communion produces Its effects in us.

"The APA's Biased Paper on Same-Sex Attraction and Therapy"

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32988

"The Sybil" on the situation in The Diocese of Wollongong

http://wollongongensis.blogspot.com/2010/08/break-picton-and-rome.html

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, A.D. 2010

Mr. Gooley on the liturgical revolution

http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=3&subclassID=75&articleID=6991&class=Features&subclass=Bite-size Vatican II

The Rev. Anthony Gooley, a deacon of The Archdiocese of Brisbane, continued his "Bite-Size Vatican II" series in last Sunday's edition of the Sydney Catholic Weekly, in an article entitled "Going back to find the liturgical way forward". The article consisted of ten paragraphs: Two introductory ones, four in which Mr. Gooley gives us a sense of his liturgical antiquarianism, and four in which he quotes from Sacrosanctum Concilium in support of this antiquarianism. Here is the first of those two sets of four paragraphs:

Scholars wanted to understand how liturgy and theology had developed by returning to the ancient sources and by stripping away elements that had accumulated over time which may have obscured the beauty and inner nature of the liturgy. The process was not unlike the restoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, removing accumulations of smoke and soot to reveal the vibrant colours which were hidden underneath.

[...] In fact, the way forward was found in going back to original sources and earlier forms. The form of the Mass after Vatican II is much closer in resemblance to the liturgy celebrated in the first millennium and into the second. Hypolitus, a presbyter in the Church of Rome, provides a description of Sunday liturgy in 150AD which in its outlines is identical with the current order.

The prayers chosen from across the centuries reflect the communion of the Church in time.

The simplification of rituals, the removal of repetitions and some elements which obscured the central meaning of the liturgy were carefully decided by going back to historical sources by considering the Eucharistic theology which had been emerging and by the goal of full, conscious and active participation. In this return to the past the way forward to a faith deeply centred on active participation in the Eucharist emerged.

So for Mr. Gooley and those of his ilk, two thousand years of liturgical development was little more than the accumulation of so much "smoke and soot" requiring a purging of those elements which "may have obscured the beauty and inner nature of the liturgy". Now to say that the "inner nature" of the Traditional Latin Mass had been (though Mr Gooley says "may have" rather than coming right out and saying so) "obscured" is quite a serious charge. Teachings can be condemned by the Magisterium not merely for their import but for their expression, not merely for being false or evil, but for obscuring the truth. Now the teaching in the liturgy is the teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium, and the teaching of the liturgy of the Church of Rome is the teaching of the Papal Ordinary Magisterium, which is infallible when all (or, practically, very many) Bishops of Rome teach unanimously. Now the Bishops of Rome across some fifteen hundreds years celebrated substantially the same liturgy, so Mr. Gooley's position here is untenable. When, I wonder, during that time does he think that the "inner nature" of the Mass became "obscured" to the extent that we needed the liturgical revolution which followed Vatican II? We know that, in his learned opinion, Mr. Gooley regards the Roman liturgy of the mid-second century as acceptable, so the question can be posed as: How long after that time did the Roman liturgy begin to 'obscure' the true meaning of the Mass? (Mr. Gooley's reference to the second century calls to mind the following quotation from Evelyn Waugh which Athanasius has posted at the left-hand side of his blog:

We had looked upon them [proponents of liturgical change] as harmless cranks who were attempting to devise a charade of second-century habits. We had confidence in the abiding Romanita of our Church. Suddenly we find the cranks in authority.

And accusing the Traditional Latin Mass of 'obscuring' the "beauty" of the Mass is no trifling matter, either, since beauty is the harmonious relation of the parts to the whole, not merely some subjective, aesthetic thing.)

And I am not sure why Mr. Gooley feels the need to mention that

The prayers chosen from across the centuries reflect the communion of the Church in time.

"[C]hosen" how and by whom, though? Surely the liturgy which best "reflect[s] the communion of the Church in [across?] time" is that which is the product of organic rather than artificial development?

So what Mr. Gooley preaches is crass antiquarianism. But it is not without usefulness for those of us who long for the restoration of the Traditional Latin Mass as the liturgy of the Church of Rome. For if it is legitimate for those of archaeologising tendencies to return to the liturgies of eighteen hundred years ago, then how can they begrudge us for wanting to 'turn the clock back' a mere forty years?

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Angela of Merici, A.D. 2010