On March 4th, Leo continued his catechesis on Lumen Gentium wherein he managed to teach an important truth, but then quickly followed by offering a purely conciliar (and decidedly false) treatment of the Church and her members.
The topics covered in this episode have far reaching consequences, most especially as it concerns the validity of Trad, Inc. and its Resist-the-Pope enterprise.
An article / transcript appears below the video.
On March 4, Leo continued his catechesis on Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.
In it, he manifested the Council perfectly.
Let me repeat myself: I said, Leo manifested the Council. I did not say that he manifested the Catholic faith.
Why do I say that he manifested the Council especially well?
Because, just like the Second Vatican Council itself, Leo taught some things that are true and important. But also like the Council, he also proposed contrary ideas and failed to make important distinctions when necessary.
The most noteworthy truth that he taught was the following:
The Church is a well-organized body, in which the human and divine dimensions coexist without separation and without confusion.
This is point lost on many of the so-called defenders of tradition. We’ll talk about some examples momentarily.
The Church, as we profess in the Creed, is one. As taught by Pope Pius XII, the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is at once a human society and a divine institution. The Holy Father describes this institution as “the union of the faithful with the divine Redeemer in this Body [the Church].” (see the Encyclicals Mystici Corporis and Meminisse Iuvat).
This unity of the human and divine in the Church is analogous to the hypostatic union, which, as Leo correctly stated, is without separation and confusion.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of self-identified defenders of Catholic tradition who routinely sow the seeds of confusion on this note.
For example, Michael J. Matt, Publisher of America’s oldest … you know the rest … often misleads his poor readers in this way. He has written about “the betrayal of Christ by the human element of the Church since Vatican II.”
Evidently what Mike has in mind the Assisi events, Amoris Laetitia, the Council itself…
Let’s stop here for a moment to acknowledge that those who publicly, openly, and obstinately betray Christ are not properly considered “of the Church,” but rather outside the Church.
Case in point, Judas Iscariot. When at the Last Supper, his betrayal of Christ was occult, i.e., it was hidden and known only to his collaborators and to God. He received Communion from the hands of Our Lord. He was counted among the twelve. Without going too deeply into his status, at this point Judas was a dead member of Christ’s Mystical Body, but a member nonetheless.
After his betrayal became publicly known and notorious, it was clear that Judas, by his own action, had severed himself from communion with Christ.
As we find in Acts 1:25, Judas has, by transgression, fallen from his ministry and apostleship.
The point is simply this: What Michael Matt calls “the betrayal of Christ by the human element of the Church,” is better understood as the betrayal of Christ by persons who have fallen – by their own transgression – from communion with the Church.
In any case, Michael goes on to say of this betrayal of Christ by this alleged human element of the Church:
Just fifty years after Vatican II, the Catholic Church is ceasing to be Catholic … For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the new orientation of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council has been, quite literally, the Devil at work.
Think about the sheer lunacy on display here: the Catholic Church is ceasing to be Catholic? The Catholic Church – quite literally – is doing the Devil’s work?
NEWSFLASH: If this were even possible, then the indefectibility of the Church as taught by the Fathers, the Doctors, the popes and the Saint is patently false.
And let’s be perfectly clear: Placing the blame on a non-existent bogeyman called the “human element” – a phantom that somehow issues authoritative teaching on behalf of the divine institution that is the Catholic Church independent of her divine element – isn’t going to fly.
Why not? Because Leo got it right: The human and the divine dimensions in the Church coexist without separation.
And guess what? Every time the Church teaches, sanctifies, and governs the flock, continuing the work of Redemption, she does so through human beings.
In his Encyclical, Mystici Corporis, Pope Pius XII teaches:
That those who exercise sacred power in this Body are its chief members must be maintained uncompromisingly. It is through them, by commission of the Divine Redeemer Himself, that Christ’s apostolate as Teacher, King and Priest is to endure … It is Christ who through the Church baptizes, teaches, rules, looses, binds, offers, sacrifices. (cf Mystici Corporis 17, 54)
In other words, the visible human element is always involved when the Church acts authoritatively, and never in a manner separated from the invisible divine element.
The last true pope to take the name Leo – Pope Leo XIII -elaborated on the impossibility of any such separation between the Church’s visible and invisible elements – that is, her humanity and divinity, in the Encyclical Satis Cognitum as follows:
The union consequently of visible and invisible elements, because it harmonizes with the natural order and by God’s will belongs to the very essence of the Church, must necessarily remain, so long as the Church itself shall endure.
This being so, it is a grave error to imagine that the Church has a so-called “human element” that operates in the name of the Church but somehow remains distinct from the one true Church of Christ.
Michael Matt is far from alone in this. Other Trad, Inc. figures prefer to lay blame for the conciliar church’s heterodoxy at the feet of a so-called “institutional Church” that is somehow distinct from the actual Church, and the point is always the same:
To convince themselves and others that all of the grave errors, blasphemies and heresies that have been taught by the Second Vatican Council, the series of alleged popes that followed, the Roman Congregations that serve at their pleasure, etc. can be written off as purely human misdeeds.
But since there is no separation between the human and the divine in the Church. Inadvertently, every time they attempt to suggest otherwise, what the captains of the Resist-the-Pope movement are doing, is proving beyond any and all doubt that the conciliar enterprise simply cannot be the Catholic Church.
On some level, they evidently realize as much.
In any case, hats off to Leo for speaking the truth about the inseparability of the human and the divine in the Mystical Body of Christ.
But please, hold your applause.
Leo went on invite confusion concerning what the Church is and who her members are, saying:
… the Church is a community of men and women who share the joy and struggle of being Christians, with their strengths and weaknesses, proclaiming the Gospel and becoming a sign of the presence of Christ who accompanies us on our journey through life.
Remember, Leo is providing the ecclesiology of Vatican II – that is, the Church’s description of herself – as expressed in Lumen Gentium.
To truly grasp what he is saying, therefore, we have to apply what I call the “hermeneutic of cohesion,” that is, we have to allow the Council to define the words that are being used. We cannot simply assume that they mean what the Church has always meant. In this case, we need to ascertain the Council’s definition of the title “Christian” insofar as membership in the Church is concerned.
For this, we’ll turn to the Decree on Ecumenism, which states:
…all who have been justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ’s body, and have a right to be called Christian, and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church.
In this, the Council is speaking specifically of heretics and schismatics as if they too are in the Church.
When Leo describes the Church in such eminently subjective terms as “men and women who share the joy and struggle of being Christians…” he’s following the Council’s lead.
How so? Well, because it casts the Catholic net in a way that includes everyone who calls themselves “Christian,” including those who hate the Church, and who insist that the Virgin Mary was a common sinner, and scoff at the Most Holt Eucharist..
The Catholic definition of membership, by contrast, is objective and straightforward. Pope Pius XII describes it as follows:
Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body… The cooperation of all the Church’s members must also be externally manifest through their profession of the same faith and their sharing the same sacred rites, through participation in the same Sacrifice, and the practical observance of the same laws.
Pius XII is repeating what his predecessors have always taught, namely, that membership in the Church, although it begins with the hidden mark of Baptism, is made manifest, visible, and knowable as one participates in the Church’s unity: the unity of faith first and foremost, unity of charity or worship, and unity of government.
Compare this with Leo’s effeminate suggestion that “joys and struggles” are the defining characteristics of membership in the Church.
Returning now to Leo XIII, he had this to say about who is in the Church:
There is only one true, holy, Catholic church, which is the Apostolic Roman Church. There is only one See founded in Peter by the word of the Lord, outside of which we cannot find either true faith or eternal salvation. He who does not have the Church for a mother cannot have God for a father, and whoever abandons the See of Peter on which the Church is established trusts falsely that he is in the Church.
There is only one true, holy, Catholic church… and to be part of that Church means being in communion with the See of Peter, otherwise, one is not in the one true, holy, Catholic church.
Point being: The Church is NOT, as Leo said, a community of persons who share their joys and their struggles, an idea that sounds more like something Oprah would say than a true Roman Pontiff.
We’ve already spoken about the Church’s unity. Now let’s consider the next mark of the Church, holiness, about which Leo – Leo the American – had this to say:
An ideal and pure Church, separated from the earth, does not exist; only the one Church of Christ, embodied in history. This is what constitutes the holiness of the Church: the fact that Christ dwells in her and continues to give himself through the smallness and fragility of her members.
He further explained that this happens when we practice “communion and charity among ourselves.”
In this case, by communion, he’s obviously referring to the Bergoglian notion of accompaniment. Listen once more to the opening remark:
An ideal and pure Church, separated from the earth, does not exist…
It sure sounds like Leo is publicly denying the existence of the Church Triumphant, doesn’t it? My assumption, however, is that he’s not really doing so intentionally.
What he is doing, however, is showing just how little regard he has for the doctrine of the Church. In other words, he doesn’t seem to consider his alleged role as chief guardian and teacher of the sacred deposit of faith important enough to speak precisely.
In any case, according to him, the holiness of the Church concerns the fact that Christ dwells in her, and this holiness manifests itself those members who engage in charity.
To many, this statement may not seem entirely objectionable. After all, he does attribute the Church’s holiness to the holiness of Christ. But that’s about all he got right.
Before I explain, remember, the marks of the Church – one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic – are what reveal her identity to those who seek her. In other words, these four marks distinguish the true Church from all other claimants.
It simply is not the case that the Church’s holiness is evidenced by the good behavior of ordinary Catholics. God forbid!
This is nothing more than a social justice spin on the Church’s holiness, one that places the focus on individual baptized persons and their behavior. It’s a diabolically brilliant twist on Our Lord’s words:
By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. (John 13:35)
Jesus did not say, if you have love one for another, then all men shall know that the Church is holy…
If this were so, then he who is searching for the true Church might wrongly assume that it exists in the community of persons that engages in the most random acts of kindness!
Now, that sounds like a joke, but the truth is, many people have landed in Protestant communities for this exact reason; the people are nicer, they’re more welcoming, they do more for the poor, etc.
The truth is the holiness of the Church, properly understood, is a function of her constitution, that is, by the fact the Jesus Christ is the Head of His Mystical Body, the Church, and thus it is that the Church herself is holy, despite the fact that so many of her members are not.
So, how does the holiness of the Church manifest itself?
Consider what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say:
The holiness which marks the Church [is] a quality that may well serve to distinguish the true Church from counterfeits … [In] the Church of Rome … her holiness appears in the doctrine which she teaches, in the worship she offers to God, in the fruits which she brings forth.
This is a Catholic understanding. The Church’s holiness appears – i.e., it is made manifest – in her teaching and in her worship…
So, at this, I ask you:
– Is a church that claims that God at times wills adultery, is that a holy church or a counterfeit church?
Or how about a church that insists that the Holy Ghost uses heretic communities too numerous to number as means of salvation?
Or what of a church that blesses homosexual couples and believes that all men have infinite dignity? Is that a holy church or a counterfeit church?
Pope Pius XII explains why the Catholic Church, thanks to the holiness of Christ, the font of holiness, can never teach such things. He states:
Jesus Christ, hanging on the Cross, opened up to His Church the fountain of those divine gifts, which prevent her from ever teaching false doctrine and enable her to rule the faithful for the salvation of their souls…
As the Catholic Encyclopedia states: The holiness of the Church serves to distinguish the true Church from counterfeits …
So, with this in mind, ponder the questions that I just asked. They aren’t merely rhetorical, they’re absolutely crucial for everyone and anyone who genuinely wishes to abide in the one true Church of Christ.
Until next time…
