Continued:
Therefore, continuity in the principles, while mutability or discontinuity in the historical forms.
Lionel:There is no continuity in the principles. Before the Council of Trent the principle was that the a catechumen's desire for the baptism of water, who dies before he received it, was a hypothetical case.So it was not an exception to the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus(EENS).For the Letter of the Holy Office 1949 the baptism of desire was an exception to the Feeneyite interpretation of the dogma EENS.So the inference is that the baptism of desire is objective, and visibly known for it to be an exception in the present times.So we have to two different principles.
I interpret Vatican Council II and EENS with the pr-Council of Trent principle and this not the same for the Latin Mass Society or for Fr. Lanzetta and Bishop Egan.
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The problem, in Benedict XVI’s judgement, is precisely the coordination of continuity and discontinuity, which both lend themselves, even if on two different levels. Today, the situation of the 60s-70s of the last century in the West has already changed greatly. A great open-minded and tolerant trust towards the exercise of religious liberty has been replaced by a frightening relativist aggression, which should stimulate the theologian to discern new possibilities for a correct exercise of religious liberty in the external forum, concentrating one’s attention more on God’s truth than on the mere possibility of choosing among the varied religious panorama. This however, requires a separate discussion.
Let us return to the problem of the method. We are talking about interpreting the documents and reading them in the light of the Church’s faith, the true key-criteria from which we must begin and the foundation to which every theological interpretation must be led back.
Lionel: Fr.Lanzetta and my concept of faith is different.He is a Cushingite and interprets the faith with an irrational theology based on philosophical relativism.It changes traditional Catholic salvation theology.He is supported by the contemporary magisterium and liberal theologians.
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I was saying that it is not sufficient to state the hermeneutical criteria that one adopts in order to have the solution.
Lionel: The 'hermeneutical critieria' is the using or avoiding an irrational premise and conclusion.It is interpreting hypothetical references as being only hypothetical and not objectively known in the present times.One can assume being saved in invincible ignorance (LG 16) refers to a theoretical case.Or, wrongly assume it is someone whom you can meet on the streets back home who has been saved as such.
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This goes both for when one adopts an incorrect criteria like that of fundamental discontinuity and rupture, as for when one adopts the correct criteria of continuity.
Lionel: One adopts the incorrect criteria with the use of the Cushingite premise.So there is a 'fundamental discontinuity and rupture'.Avoid it and there remains the correct criteria for continuity.
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I will give an example to clarify this concept. Let us take a doctrinal element contained in the decree on ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio n.11: the so-called “hierarchy of truths”. What does it mean? Formulated in this way, this principle is rather new and typical of Vatican II. Certainly one must interpret this proposition correctly, which in turn serves as a criteria of interpretation of “Revelation”. Does this mean that there are truths hierarchically subordinated because less revealed than others or less binding than others because not so important? Certainly not, but it means that in the system of revealed truths (defined or not defined by the Church), not all of them have the same relationship with the basis of Revelation. For example: the Immaculate Conception of Mary is connected to God’s Revelation through the truth of original sin originated and of Christ’s Universal Redemption, but no one would dare to say that it is less important or less revealed than the truth of Universal Redemption. The hierarchy of truths must be read in view of the analogy of truth and not as subordination of some truths to others, to the point of being able to favour their momentary or permanent “pastoral freezing”. Therefore, using the hermeneutical criteria of continuity of the Council with all of the Church’s faith, analogia fidei is the only way to read this “hierarchy of truths” correctly and not using, on the contrary, as some theologians do, the precedence of praxis over theory – that is the precedence of ecumenical dialogue over the one and unique truth of the Church, claiming the unity of Christ’s disciples, invoked by the Lord Himself, more impelling today than the unity of the Church constituted by Christ.
Lionel: I agree here.
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The hermeneutical principle can therefore constitute a problem. The only way that it can be used correctly is for it to be guided by what the Church has always believed and lived.
Lionel: Precisely.The Church had in the past accepted the baptism of desire in good will and in response to a campaign to have it accepted as relevant to EENS. However the Church before the Council of Trent did not claim that what common sense indicates is implicit, must be interpreted as being explicit.
When St.Thomas Aquinas mentioned in the man in the forest living in invincible ignorance he did not say that this was someone who could be personally known. Yet this is how St. Thomas Aquinas is re-interpreted.
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In concise words, the only correct principle of interpretation of Vatican II is the uninterrupted Tradition of the Church, which also protects us from another risk: to resolve the whole of Vatican II in a hermeneutical problem, through an adaptation more or less favourable to modernity, which poses the problem of interpretation as the fundamental problem, and forgetting rather, the true reason wherefore a council is convoked within the Church. It is time, fifty years after the last ecumenical council, to make room for the faith rather then a sole interpretation of Vatican II.
Lionel: There was a break with the 'uninterrupted Tradition of the Church' with the Baltimore Catechism.A hypothetetical case of an unknown catechumen was placed in the Baptism Section of the Catechism.It was called a baptism even though it could not be physically seen like the baptism of water, nor repeated like the baptism of water. Then the break with the dogma EENS, a foundation dogma for other teachings of the Church, was complete in the 1949 Letter of the Holy Office in the Boston Heresy Case.
Therefore, that one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing.-Letter of the Holy Office 1949
Appropriately it was called the Boston Heresy Case.
-Lionel Andrades
JULY 10, 2016
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