Sunday, 6 October 2013
A serious note on Dei Verbum
Father Chad Ripperger states that...."the modernists adhere faithfully to their principle that the subjective dispositions of the individual are to remain sacrosanct as well as respected..." The good priest is referring to the Holy Mass, however, one can apply this line to morality and interpretations of Scripture.
One also cannot enter into rational discourse with a subjectivist.
Father Riperger notes that "Real assent is an intellectual judgment that a particular proposition is true and the person leads his life according to it. Those Catholics who follow the orthodox traditional teaching as manifested in the Fathers and doctors of the Church fall into this category insofar as they hole to the actual value and binding force of the tradition and lead their life according to it as well."
This leads me to the next compelling statement in Fr. Ripperger's book, which corresponds with what I told my students about Dei Verbum. I always taught that each student had to read and understand Providentissimus Deus before reading the Vatican II document on Scripture. In fact, Father Ripperger uses Dei Verbum as an example of something I wrote the other day referring to Schillebeeckx. Fr. Ripperger points out that Cardinal Yves Congar (and Schillebeeckx) pushed the emphasis of the Church back to the Scriptures, noting that the rule of faith was not the Magisterium, but Scripture.
Red lights and sirens should go off in people's minds regarding this idea. Fr. Ripperger goes on in his new (March) book, which I mentioned earlier, that one can approach the rule of faith in four ways. In the next few days, I shall outline these points from his book.
But, before I do that, I want to, again, give this background of relativism and the purposeful undermining of Tradition in the Church since the 1950s. There is a misunderstanding that the problem of the post-Vatican II happened at Vatican II. Of course not. The theologians were adults formed in the seminaries either in the 1930, 1940s, or 1950s where the rot of modernism had already set in.
Why Fr. Ripperger's little book is important will be seen.
Some of you can already see that this entire study has to do with a Protestant vs. Catholic way of thinking.
A theme on this blog....
To be continued....