What gives the conciliar church the right to behave as if what the Church consistently taught in ages past is now up for discussion and possible revision? Why does it engage in “Synodality,” inviting lay men and women to participate in roundtable discussions to share their religious experiences in order to “develop” Tradition?
The answer is simple: It’s the Council!
In his latest catechesis, Leo addresses those parts of Dei Verbum that set the stage for the unadulterated Modernism so freely practiced by the conciliar church.
As always, your comments are more welcome.
TRANSCRIPT
Before we get started today, I want to say a word about the value of these episodes. SPOILER ALERT: It has very little to do with my opinions, much less how I express them.
We’re not just picking Leo’s words apart here for sport. The value in this exercise lies in the fact that we have the current head of the conciliar church providing for us, yet again, the undeniably correct interpretation of Vatican Council II.
The pundits and the professional Vatican II apologists can twist the conciliar text into as many pretzels as they want, whatever it takes to make it look as though it’s compatible with the true faith, but here we have the one man who alone is eminently qualified to tell us exactly how the conciliar text is to be understood, laying it all out for us.
In other words, he’s telling us what the Council’s teachings actually mean and how they’re to be applied in the conciliar church moving forward.
And you will notice that, at least up to this point, he’s not saying anything new. He’s merely confirming what each of his predecessors had taught about the Council. And what’s more, he’s highlighting for us what must be considered the most important parts of the conciliar text, the ones that deserve our closest attention.
So, only a fool would ignore this. I mean, it’s a great gift, honestly.
These general audiences are a terrific opportunity for us to compare and to contrast what Leo is teaching, what the Council is teaching, with the immutable doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church. And along the way, I genuinely think that those viewers who come to this series with an open heart and an open mind are going to be very hard pressed to deny that Vatican Council II established a new religion; it’s a new faith and a new church, none of which are actually Catholic.
And so with that in mind, please, to the extent that I’m preaching to the choir: I’m imploring you choir members, spread this series around if you think it might be helpful to your friends who are caught up in the Novus Ordo World and who just don’t quite understand what a stark departure from the Catholic faith Vatican Council II truly is.
With all of that said, at his General Audience on Wednesday, January 28th, Leo continued his catechesis on Dei Verbum, and this week he turned his attention to Articles 8 through 10.
Now at this rate, so this is Dei Verbum number three, this is his third stab at Dei Verbum, which is not a very long document. And so my tongue in cheek commented at the beginning of this series about it lasting well into 2028. I mean, it was a joke then, but it seems pretty reasonable now. It’s actually no laughing matter. We might be doing this for several years!
In any case, Leo provided a couple of Scripture passages that he said would serve as a backdrop to this week’s audience. And one of them, was from John 16:13, which reads:
When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.
Now, I say this is how John 16:13 reads, but this is how it reads in the conciliar church. Now, I’m not going to repeat the entire argument that I made in my last blog post on this very passage. I’ve linked it below if anyone’s interested and hasn’t read it yet.
Stated very briefly, this phrase “will guide you into,” is a mistranslation of the Latin Vulgate, which is more accurately rendered as “will teach you.”
And the difference is profound because this mistranslation “will guide you,” it gives one the impression that the Church is receiving Divine Revelation piecemeal, as if she’s constantly being guided further and further into the truth, and she’s slowly making her way toward its fullness.
In other words, the takeaway from all of this is that the Church arguably has more divine truth today than she did, for example, before the Almighty Council met in the 1960s. And she will have even more divine truth at some point in the future.
And this, as Leo went on to confirm, is exactly what the conciliar church actually believes. We can see it in the conciliar church’s behavior.
In Dei Verbum, under the chapter heading, “Handing On Divine Revelation,” we find this gem:
For as the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of Divine Truth, until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her.
This is Dei Verbum, Article 8.
By contrast, the Catholic Church has consistently taught that the transmission of Divine Truth – that is to say the full truth of Divine Revelation, as imparted and entrusted to the Catholic Church alone – it ceased with the death of the last Apostle.
In other words, the Church is not gradually moving toward the fullness of Divine Truth. No, she possesses it!
In Ott’s “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma,” we’re instructed the following.
Pope Pius X rejected the liberal Protestant and modernistic doctrine of the evolution of religion through “New Revelations.” Thus, he condemned the proposition that the Revelation, which is the object of Catholic faith, was not terminated with the Apostles.
And here Ott is referencing Denzinger no. 2021, in case you want to take a look at it. Ott continues:
The clear teaching of Holy Writ and Tradition is that after Christ and the Apostles who proclaim the message of Christ, no further revelation will be made. The full truth of Revelation is contained in the doctrine of the Apostles, which is preserved unfalsified through the uninterrupted succession of the bishops.
In the Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX spoke likewise. He condemned the idea that, “divine revelation is subject to a continual and indefinite progress.”
Well, this is essentially the error that was repeated by the Council when it said that the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth. And that error necessarily leads to the modernist notion that what the Church professed as true in ages past is subject to revision based on current circumstances.
Is this not precisely how the conciliar church behaves? Of course it is. Amoris Letitia is a perfect example where Francis boldly declared, no longer can it simply be said…, right?
He’s aware of what has been taught up to that point, and he’s saying, we can’t say that anymore. Why? Well, because the Church is being led further into divine truth.
In any case, moving on, Leo went on to cite, Dei Verbum, Article 9, which says the following:
There exists a close connection and communication between sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, for both of them flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way, merge into a unity and tend toward the same end.
Again, this is DV9. Now, at first glance, this seems like a reasonably Catholic statement, but the most troubling aspect of the Council’s treatment of Scripture and Tradition here is that it suggests, or at the very least it invites one to imagine, that Scripture on its own tends toward the same end as sacred Tradition, as if Scripture and Tradition, each in their own way, are vehicles that lead to the fullness of divine truth and thus to eternal salvation.
And so, in short, missing entirely from Dei Verum, Article 9, is any sense that sacred tradition is preeminent. It’s preeminent.
How can we say this?
Well, it’s a matter of historical fact that sacred Tradition handed on the true faith, it offered divine truth to the faithful, and it pointed the way to eternal salvation well before the contents of the written word of Divine Revelation, the Bible, were even identified, much less made widely known.
It’s an indisputable fact that sacred Traditional alone was sufficient in the Early Church in order for one to know divine truth without any error at all, and thus the way of everlasting life.
As for Scripture alone? Well, take a brief look at the Protestant world with its rejection of the priesthood, its gay marriages, its homo-clergy, and so on.
Clearly, any good intentions or sincerity aside, just having the Bible in hand leads to nothing but disagreement. It leads to confusion and ultimately leads to unforgiven mortal sin for far too many, if not all.
In his encyclical, Providentissimus Deus, Pope Leo XIII teaches the Catholic understanding, writing this:
Supernatural revelation, according to the belief of the Universal Church, is contained both in unwritten Tradition and in written books, which are therefore called sacred and canonical.
Scripture itself, in the final words of St. John’s Gospel, attests to the fact that the Church simply cannot fulfill its God-given mission of teaching everything whatsoever that our Lord commanded without sacred Tradition.
The Evangelist tells us:
But there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written, every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written.
So, what Dei Verbum is demonstrating, yet again, is the Council’s unbridled commitment to pacifying the Protestants. In other words, the Bible only heretics, and this all in the name of ecumenism – a driving force in practically everything that the Council did.
Leo went on to quote the 1991 conciliar Catechism, the one that was published under John Paul the Great Ecumenist. Leo says this:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, [and here he refers to number 113] refers in this regard to a motto of the Church Fathers. “Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records,” that is [Leo explains] in the sacred text.
I took a look at the 1991 Catechism and it states the following:
“According to a saying of the church fathers, sacred scripture is written principally in the church’s heart…” and so on.
Now there’s no extra quotation marks in this. So, evidently the 1991 Catechism is offering a paraphrase of this supposed saying of the Fathers, whereas Leo is making it seem as if it’s a quote of the Fathers.
In any case, the funny thing is, I couldn’t find even one Patristic source that even comes close to this alleged saying of the Fathers. Now, if I missed it, and I might have, I’ll stand corrected. So please, if you can find something in the Patristic tradition to support this idea, send it to me and I’ll correct the record.
But in the meantime, I’m filing this one under fake and gay. I think this is something that was spun up by the captains of the conciliar church to further their agenda. I’m not believing it.
In any case, Leo refers back then to Dei Verbum, Article 8, which we just talked about. In this case, he cites where the Council talks about Apostolic Tradition saying, “it develops in the church with the help of the Holy Spirit.”
As for exactly how that happens, Leo continued by quoting Dei Verbum No. 8 a little bit more extensively:
This development occurs with full comprehension through “contemplation and study made by believers,” through “a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience,” and above all with the preaching of the successors of the apostles, who have “received the sure gift of truth.”
So according to Leo, according to the Council, the development of sacred Tradition takes place, in part, thanks to the spiritual experiences of believers like us, all believers, just ordinary believers and their experiences, according to the penetrating understanding that they have of those experiences.
Now the falsity of this nonsense is presumably obvious to pretty much everybody watching this right now, but I would suggest that those who are at all confused about why this is unacceptable to avail themselves of the Encyclical of Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, On the Doctrines of the Modernists, in this case Article 14 in particular, because that’s where the Holy Father examines, “The Modernist as Believer: Individual Experience and Religious Certitude.” And, obviously, what the Holy Father goes on to do is to condemn the idea that individual experience leads to religious certitude, this penetrating understanding that the Council talks about.
The Council’s endorsement of religious experience as a legitimate catalyst for doctrinal development, well, this is what paved the way for Synodality, right, wherein every Tom, Dick, and Susie gets to take part in a round table discussion to share their feelings and their understanding of the experiences that they’ve had.
It’s nonsense. It’s textbook modernism.
Leo went on to paraphrase, not directly quote here, but to paraphrase the work of John Henry Newman, the newest doctor of the conciliar church, describing Christianity as, “a communal experience and a dynamic reality that develops thanks to an inner vital force.”
Now, regardless of whether or not Leo is providing an accurate snapshot of Newman’s thoughts – and you’ll notice there is no crucial context either way – the fact of the matter is he is acting – and I would say pretending – he’s acting as pope, and here he’s endorsing yet another of the Modernist errors that were exposed by Pius X, namely that concerning what he described in Pascendi as “vital imminence.”
Okay. So again, I would highly recommend reading Pascendi carefully, if you haven’t already. It will totally expose Dei Verbum and the comments that it makes as just being Modernist fluff.
As I mentioned a number of times in my series on the Vatican II documents with Kevin Davis at Catholic Family Podcast:
The conciliar text often contradicts itself. In one place, it will make statements that are perfectly consonant with what the Church has always taught. And then a paragraph later, or a paragraph before that, it’ll teach something that totally undermines Catholic teaching.
Leo, in his last General Audience, was no different. He did the same. And my advice in both cases is the same as well.
If you want to go ahead, you can scour Leo’s words, you can scour the conciliar text, looking for everything that’s stated that’s in line with the true faith. And if you do that, you’ll find some things.
I did exactly that for a number of years and went about calling people’s attention to those faithful words. You know, I regret it now because I realize at this point that the problem is in the poison. It’s in the poison.
So, I want you to think of these Conciliar Catechesis Watch episodes as something of a detailed warning label, right? One that I would implore you to share with your friends and family members who are caught up in the conciliar church and just simply don’t know better, but sincerely just want to be Catholics. Hopefully this will help them.
Thanks for joining me. Until next time.
