By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 42
A common question I hear from people is this: Where can you find a collection of Church teachings coming from the ordinary Magisterium? The answer is simple: You find the teachings of the ordinary Magisterium in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Everyone should have a Catechism at home. The Catechism gives you all the most important doctrines of the Church, taken from Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. There you find those teachings well explained and illustrated. A wealth of footnotes is provided, so that those who are really serious about learning can consult the sources to acquire a greater knowledge. Your Wanderer provides you with excellent material by our colleague Don Fier.
As we are investigating the infallibility of the Church, the first question we ask ourselves is: What about the object of her infallibility? By “object” is meant the truths, topics, subject matters, which are covered by infallibility. They may be divided into two classes.
First, there are doctrines in the Deposit of Faith, that is, all doctrines delivered by Christ to the apostles during His mortal life here on Earth. In plain English, what did Jesus Christ teach His apostles, and command them to preach to the whole of mankind, in His Name? These teachings are called the Deposit of Faith. Any subsequent revelations which God may grant to individual people are private, and do not form part of the Deposit of Faith.
Second, Popes may exercise infallibility only and exclusively in matters directly relevant to salvation, that is, faith and morals: what we must believe in and what we must do to be saved. Faith and good works. Luther’s idea of faith alone is entirely unbiblical and dangerous to salvation, as it pretend to guarantee salvation to people by simply believing in Jesus’ sacrifice and redemption without necessarily having to avoid sin. This doctrine makes void Jesus’ teaching to the rich man in the Gospel that to be saved one must keep the Commandments.
St. John the Evangelist is adamantly clear in teaching that the written Tradition — the Bible — does not contain all of Christ’s teachings: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book” (John 20:30). “Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).
A different question is whether or not the discipline of the Church, that is, Church-made laws and regulations, particular ceremonial directives and options, are also covered by infallibility. The answer is simple: No, they are not. The prudential decision and judgments of the Pope and the bishops are not infallible, and can be wrong. Their individual opinions on music, art, politics, economy, science, and so on are not protected by infallibility.
The Church is infallible in her teaching, but not in the exercise of her government.
+ + +
The Deposit of Faith (cf. 1 Tim. 6:20) comprises all doctrines found in the Bible and in Sacred Tradition. A brief analysis of these terms will suffice for our purpose:
The Bible, as everyone knows, consists of the inspired books of the Old and the New Testaments. It has God Himself as its Author; the inspired writers acted as the human agents who cooperated with God in the composition of the texts. We do not know exactly how that cooperation worked, because the writers were not mindless people simply copying what was dictated to them. As the individual writing styles vary noticeably from writer to writer, it is evident that the human element played a part in the composition.
Sacred Tradition — it should be noted that Sacred Tradition also includes the Sacred Scriptures. So we can say that the Bible is written Tradition, alongside the oral Tradition. Both are Tradition. Oral Tradition embraces all those truths which, though never committed to writing under divine inspiration, have been handed down within the Church from age to age in various ways. They can be found in several sources:
The works of the fathers of the Church. They were learned and saintly ecclesiastical writers who lived before AD 750 and whose orthodoxy is specially recognized by the Church: The writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch (AD 110) and St. Justin Martyr (AD 250) are examples of the early Church fathers, and the writings of Pope St. Gregory the Great, the last of the Latin fathers, who died in 604 and St. John Damascene, the last of the Greek fathers, who died in 749, close the age of the Church fathers. Their writings are outstanding works to explain the Mind of Christ as expounded in Sacred Scripture.
A great many Protestant theologians have converted to Catholicism by simply reading the works of the Church fathers, and thus realizing that the teachings of the early Church were the same as the teachings of the Church today. The only difference is that today those teachings are more explicit.
The Acts of the Martyrs is another source of Sacred Tradition. It records in several instances the express doctrines for which the martyrs suffered. These doctrines are of particular importance, since the martyrs laid down their lives in their defense.
The professions of faith, and the teachings of Popes and councils, are sources.
Early paintings and inscriptions, found in the catacombs and elsewhere, give testimony to these professions and teachings.
The practices and customs of the Universal Church, as well as the sacred liturgy, are also sources.
So, we Catholics call the Bible and Tradition “the sources of faith.” They are the two channels by which the doctrine of Christ comes down to us. We owe to the Catholic Church the care and guardianship whereby the Bible was kept intact through the centuries. If anyone today, Catholic or Protestant, is able to read the Bible, it is because the Catholic Church kept it in its integrity.
She was and is the divinely appointed guardian and interpreter of both: “Revelation is transmitted integrally either in written form or in oral tradition through the legitimate succession of bishops and above all through the watchful solicitude of the Roman Pontiff himself” (Lumen Gentium, n. 25).
Next article: The Primacy of the Pope.
+ + +
(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress