Experience vs. knowledge

Also in yesterday’s Catholic Weekly was a Zenit interview with His Grace The Lord Archbishop of Adelaide. I was dismayed at His Grace’s answer to the following question:

Q: What does the Church in Australia need to do after World Youth Day?

His Grace answered:

… I could give people long lectures on the theology of the Church and talk about the reality of “communio”. And that’s good and powerful, but is nothing compared to the real experience of “communio”. That’s what we have to do. We have to give young people everywhere this experience of community …
(my emphasis)

What young Australian Catholics need desperately is catechesis. The strong turn-out of young adults at WYD08 catechesis sessions shows that there is an openness to this. But in the Australian Catholic schools, catechesis virtually ends with primary school and shifts to an experiential and ecumenical (bordering on the syncretistic at times) focus in high school. The post-Vatican II experience-based ‘new catechesis’ failed miserably. Youngsters can find an ‘experience of community’ in many places, most fully in the Church of course, but only the Church has the ‘words of eternal life’, the truths necessary for salvation.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Honouring Scripture by finding it similar to ourselves?

The Sydney Catholic Weekly carried a rather confused C.N.S. article in yesterday’s edition. The ambiguous title, “Events that shaped the Catholic Bible”, gave some clue as to the confusion that was to follow. In the second paragraph the author makes the breathtakingly badly-worded assertion that

the Catholic version of the Bible is actually a library of books specifically chosen to reflect Catholic teaching
(my emphasis)

If taken at face value, this amounts to an assertion that the Church determined the canon of the Bible with a view to suiting her own teachings, rather than identifying the Bible as a source of the Word of God from which (along with Tradition) she derives her teaching. The author’s mistake is reiterated later in the piece when we read that

Over time, the Catholic hierarchy, too, chose Scriptures that best reflected their interpretation of the true word of God.

The “too” here is saying that the Church chose her canon like the Protestants chose theirs, as the article describes in the paragraph that preceded this one, and thus it compounded the error still further.

Furthermore, it is not clear how it can be said that

“Today, these differences [between Catholic and Protestant Scriptural teaching] are largely being overcome,” [Fr. Watson] continued, “since more and more editions of the Bible are being published in ‘ecumenical editions’, which incorporate all the books sacred to Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians

when this is a marginalising, not an overcoming, of the differences.

Reginaldvs Cantvar