Lutherlust

Flashback 1967

Editor’s Note. This was published in The Wanderer November 9, 1967

By Jerome Docherty, O.S.B

Being a senior citizen I am an Oldster, and therefore just 60 years out of date to the Youngsters. And as for the Council of Trent, well that is just 400 years out of date! It is very strange therefore to me, an Oldster, to see the Youngsters resurrecting Luther who died just 430 years ago! If their only fault were inconsistency one could be tolerant. But their main fault is very grave. Their efforts to re-evaluate and rehabilitate Luther con­stitute a severe judgment and condemnation of all the Popes who dealt with Luther or managed the Council of Trent, of that same Ecumenical Council itself, and of all the contemporary theologians, many of whom were saints.

WHOLESALE CONDEMNATION
OF SAINTS AND SCHOLARS

The Popes, the Council and the theologians are all condemned as lacking the ability to enter into Luther’s mind or rise to the level of his lofty thought. Is not this presumption on the part of men who lack the mental acumen of the Popes, scholars and saints of Luther’s day? These were all learned men, and at the least, masters in-theology, and knew more about Cath­olic theology than Dr. Martin Luther. Many of them were intellectual giants, like Lainez, Salmeron, Peter Canisius, Baronius. Ignorance of this fact may excuse your presumption, but cannot change it. Just list the Popes and scholars of the day: Leo X, Adrian VI, Clem-

ent VII, Paul III, Marcellus, Julius III, Pius IV, Pius V, taking in the period from 1513 to 1572. Then the theo­logians: St. John Fisher, Cardinal Cajetan, St. Cajetan, Fr. John Eck, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Borgia, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Philip Neri, St. Peter Canisius, Lainez, Salmeron, Baronius, Cardinal Pole, Fr. Sanders. Now it is plain matter of history that all these Popes, scholars and saints passed exactly the same judgment upon Luther. They could not all have been dumb. They could not all have con­spired to treat him badly. Then how explain the fact of their unanimity? The explanation is very simple. They all called him and Calvin and the rest “Novatores —

The Innovators,” because that is precisely what they were. They threw out the old dogmas of the Church and introduced their own new and revolutionary views. Now the Protestant historian, Harnack, goes along with that: “In Luther’s Reformation the old dogmatic Christianity was discarded and a new evangelical view sub­stituted.” Harnack thought Luther was right in doing so. He never suggests that the Popes and theologians did not understand what he was doing.

OUT OF THEIR OWN MOUTH

As the Young-sters will not “allow” me to cite the giants in the field, Pastor and Grisar, under protest I will not appeal to them. But I will introduce a more formidable witness, the renowned Protestant historian, Harnack (1851-1930) who will prove too much for them. And this is how the great scholar talks: “He cut the root of the whole Catholic notion of the Sacraments.” (History Of Dogmas, Vol. VII, p. 216, Dover Edition, 1961.) “He overturned the Catholic Sacrament of Pen­ance” (p. 220). “He likewise overthrew the whole hierarchical and priestly church system” (p. 220).

“He made havoc with the Bishops, Councils, and even the Pope, and pilloried them as men who sought for all possible things, only not the honor of God and Christ” (p. 220).

“Not less radical was his attitude towards ec­clesiastical worship of God. He also broke down the tradition, not only of the medieval, but also of the ancient church, as this is traceable by us back to the second century. . . . What is contemplated therefore in public divine service can be in no way different from this: the building up of faith through the proclamation of the divine word and the offering of the common sacrifice of piaise” (p. 221).

“He gained the insight and the courage to protest against the formal authorities of Catholicism as against the commandments of men. Thereby, however, he threw the whole system of Catholicism, as it had been elabor­ated from the days of Irenaeus, d. 203; for the inviolability of this system rests simply on the formal authorities: the faith that the fathers and schoolmen appealed to was obedience to the church doctrine, an obedience that is certain of . what it holds, because those authorities are represented as inviolable. But Luther protested against all these authorities, the infallibility of the Church, of the Pope, the Councils and the Church Fathers, both with re­gard to Christian doctrine and with regard to the exposi­tion of Scripture: against the guarantee which the con­stitution of the Church was alleged to furnish for truth, and against every formulation of the past as such, on the ground that in every case they themselves required to be proved” (pp. 223-224).

7. Summing up, he says: “In view of what has just been set forth in the two preceding paragraphs with regard to the Christianity of Luther and his criticism of the ec­clesiastical dogma, it cannot but be held that in Luther’s Reformation the old dogmatic Christianity was discarded and a new evangelical view substituted for it” (p. 227). “The formal authorities of dogma were swept away: there­by dogma itself, i. e., the inviolable system. of doctrine established by the Holy Spirit, was abolished. . . . The history of dogma, which had its very beginning in the age of the Apologists, (2nd Century), nay, of the Apostolic Fathers, was brought to an end” (p. 228).

I’ll challenge anybody to find anything quite as devastating as that in Pastor or Grisar. Then, I ask, why try to scrape up some poor sweepings of Catholic teaching amid all this frightful wreckage? Many current publications are attempting this salvage. To me they all appear to overlook the fatal weakness of their dredging. I mean they are sitting in judgment, as I stated above, on all the contemporary Popes and theologians, and even the great Ecumenical Council of Trent.

Let me add here that it did not require theological scholarship to detect so barefaced a discarding of the old and a substituting of the new. People of simple faith did it, like St. Angela da Merici, an exact contemporary of Luther, 1470-1540. In her Testament she warned her Nuns against “heresy,” the evil of the time. She reminds superiors they are meant to protect their charges from “counterfeit religions and heresies.” (The First Ursuline,Mary Ready, Newman, p. 140.) “They were to take great care to avoid especially pernicious and heretical ideas in these pestilential times” (p. 139).Luther, of course, did maintain that everybody was conspiring against him and the truth, headed by the devil himself. He went further. “He generated a revolutionary ‘attitude towards the past and to the inherited norms of culture. As Dollinger wrote, the new generation in the schoolS and universities ‘were taught to despise past gen­erations and consequently their ancestors as men wilfully plunged in error,’ and to believe ‘that the Popes and

Bishops and theologians and the universities, the mon­asteries and all the teaching corporations had formed for centuries a vast conspiracy to deform and suppress the teaching of the Gospel.’ ” (Dawson, The Crisis Of Western Education, Sheed and Ward, 1961, p. 35.) . I am afraid this ugly lie of Luther is seeping in among Catholics. Herein lies a most grave present peril: a recrudescence of Luther’s revolt and utter contempt of the past among Catholics. This I think is the most insidious of the attacks within the Church, referred to by the Pope in his open­ing address to the Roman Synod of Bishops.

Mr. Dawson. just quoted, is a very famous convert. He is unequalled in his own field, the history of culture. It should be of interest that his scholarship led him to the same conclusions as Harnack. What is more interesting still is his study of the genesis of Luther’s new views. His research has dispelled the wishful thinking that Luther never would have taken the step had he foreseen the con­sequences. Dawson proves conclusively that Luther had gone off the track as a young priest and was actually teach­ing heresy even before his first protest in 1517.

Mr. Dawson writes, “At the beginning the full extent of Luther’s alienation from the Church’s teaching was not obvious. It was in 1516 that he began to teach clearly his new doctrine of a subjective faith in Christ’s Redemption without regard to good works. The indulgence controversy, 1517, in the following year, gave him the opportunity to develpe and publish his ideas. The two key points between Luther and the Church which came to light in his com­mentary on Romans, in 1516, were (a) the concept of sin, and (b) the issue of good works and free will.” (The Di-riding Of Christendom, Sheed and Ward, 1965, p. 78.) “When he was once launched on the controversy he was unable to restrain himself from giving utterance to his revolutionary ideas. And the opposition that he encoun­tered at Rome and in Germany led him .on even before his condemnation at Rome, to the final break with the Papacy, and the whole tradition of medieval Catholicism which is expressed in the great pamphlets of 1520, (1) The Appeal To The Christian Nobility Of The German Nation, (2) The Babylonian Captivity Of The Church, and (3) The Freedom. Of A Christian Man. Even before the appear­ance of these famous writings, he had already, in his re­plies to Alveldt and Prierias, “on the Papacy at Rome,” taken up his final position against the Papacy. He had asserted that the true Church is a purely spiritual kingdom that has nothing to do with the Hierarchy or the Roman Papacy — which was, on the contrary, “The Antichrist of whom the whole Scripture speaks, and the Roman Curia nothing but the Synagogue of Satan” (p. 80).

“In the Appeal Luther passes judgment on theological first principles — above all on the doctrine of the priest­hood of the laity. He insisted that all Christians are equal. There is no real distinction between the temporal and spiritual orders. Priests aid Bishops are merely function• aries of the Christian society and possess no inherent power of jurisdiction. All power belongs to the magistrate who is just as much a.functionary of the Christian body as the priest” (p/81). “In his treaties, On The Freedom Of A Christian Man, Luther unveils his fundamental beliefs on the power of Faith and, the valueless of works, so that a man of Faith is the spiritual Lord of all” (p. 82). “The consequences of these doctrines are drawn out in two further works, (1) The Babylonian Captivity Of The Church, which is directed against Catholic sacramental teaching, and denies the validity of the Sacrament of Orders and the Sacrifice of the Mass; and (2) On The Monastic Vows, which was written a year later, and seeks to show that monasticism is irreconcilable within his doctrine of faith and with the liberty of a Christian man” (p. 82). “All these works, except the last were written before Luther’s final break with the Church” (p. 82).

What the wishful thinkers fail to see is that Luther’s system was one hundred percent per­sonal. Mr. Dawson sums it up thus: “He recog­nized no truths except those which he felt and saw directly by an immediate act of psycho­logical intuition. In comparison with this nothing else mattered. The authority of the Church, the witness of tradition, the religious experience of others, the dogmas of the theological schools, counted for nothing or less than nothing when they did not agree with his personal intuitions and convictions. This makes his teaching more subjective and one-sided than that of any other Christian thinker” (p. 77).

May I quote a born Catholic? Philip Hughes puts all this in a nutshell: “What Luther, Calvin and the rest did, was not to reform the Catholic system in which they were bred, but to build up new systems, systems based on their revolutionary theological theories.” (Popular History Of The Catholic Church, Image Book, p. 158.) Again, “What the movement will be chiefly, in Luther’s intention, is not a crusade to reform the moral lives of Catholics, clerics as well as layfolk, but rather a crusade against Catholicism itself, .observant, conscientious, dutiful Catholicism, now considered to be a corruption of the Gospel of Christ. And on his own showing, according to his own account, the origins of his stupendous conviction lie in his own personal experience of the ineffectiveness and the mis­chievousness of Catholicism as a solution offered him for his spiritual troubles, and in his own divinely guided dis­covery of the true meaning of the religion of Christ.” (Popular History Of The Reformation, p. 9 1 . )

I always show these two passages to anybody, priest, Religious or lay, who comes to me with the wishful thinking about Luther and the phantasy that he never would have left the Church had he foreseen the consequences. What astonishes me is that without exception my stu­dents and friends are amazed at these statements of a great historian, and their admission that they never got that angle before. What has happened to history in our Catholic schools and seminaries?

This leads me naturally to discuss another phantasy dear to many Protestants and Catholics alike. Let the Protestant historian, Meissinger, formulate it: “If Luther returned today . . . he would finds to his astonishment a Roman Church which he never would have attacked in her present aspect . . . above all he would see . . . that not one of the abuses Which were the occasion of his break with Rome remains in existence.” (Quoted and endorsed by Karl Adam in Roots Of The Reformation, Canterbury Books, Sheed and Ward, p. 62.) I find it hard to have to contradict two such fine scholars. But I must as this phantasy is just too widespread among Catholics. A regards the abuses, none of which now remains in. exist­ence, if Luther had been the only person to raise his voice, or the first to protest, I might consider the statement. But it is totally false. Has nobody ever read the almost abject admissions of Pope Adrian VI, that most holy man so shabbily treated by Luther? Has nobody read St. Thomas More, or Erasmus’ or the opening address at the Council of Trent? Very likely not. And this is my pet gripe. Today people want to discuss history without reading history.

Anyhow, we have to face up to the plain fact that it was not only abuses which he labeled as abuses. He dubbed abuses the things most sacred to the faith of Catholics: the Papacy, the priesthood, the Sacrifice of the Mass, etc., etc.

So, were he to come back today, I ask you to consider what kind of a headache he would have with the following:

Papal infallibility,

The Council’s teaching about the Magisterium of the Church,

The Church’s firm adherence to the principle of monasticism, with a special stress on the con­templative orders,

The encyclical, “Humani Generis,” with its re­assertion of Trent’s doctrine on Original Sin,

The encyclical “Sacra Virginitas,” and Pope Paul’s recent one on celibacy,

The encyclical on the Holy Eucharist, with its strong reaffirmation of Transubstantiation, the power of the priesthood, etc.,

The great Biblical encyclicals stressing the old principles of interpretation, especially two:

The Bible is not the sole rule of faith,

The Church alone has the exclusive authority and right to interpret Scripture.

Do you think he would be happy about any of these “Popish corruptions” as he called them all in his own day? I think the answer is patent.

May I conclude with a note of warning to those who think it a duty to read Luther, Calvin, or the modern Lutherans, Barth and the rest. Even when one has a thorough grounding in theology there is a danger. TO great converts, Newman and Faber, two very good theologians, were very conscious of this danger. And Newman wrote this while still a Protestant in 1829: “It is said that a man may go on sipping first white and then port, till he loses all perception which is which: and it is very great good fortune in this day if we manage to escape a parallel misery in theology.” (The Anglo-Americ^an Church, October, 1839: Essays Critical And Historical’ Vol. I, p. 372.) How prophetic!