original sin

Conciliar Church

Conciliar Church on July 11, 2009

The expression “Conciliar Church” gives rise to much confusion. For instance, how can the Catholic Church, the spotless Bride of Christ (Eph.V, 27), be stained with the new man-centred religion of Vatican II, i.e. Conciliarism? Yet Our Lord founded only one Church, so if the “Conciliar Church” is not Catholic, there must be two Churches, a Conciliar Church and a Catholic Church? Impossible.

Indeed there are not two Churches. There is only the one Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that is the Catholic Church. But this Catholic Church is embodied in human beings who are necessarily imperfect. Our Lord instituted it to save not angels or animals, but exclusively us poor human beings who tend by ourselves, because of original sin, only to fall further and further away from Heaven and from God.

So the Catholic Church always has two aspects: divine by its origin or beginning (Jesus Christ) and by its end (bringing souls to Heaven), it is, in between, also necessarily human, by its involvement in amongst the human beings it came to save. Therefore as there must be human beings inside the Church, so too there will always be imperfections inside the Church, sometimes very visible, but these imperfections will still be incapable of staining the Bride of Christ, spotless in herself.

Now Conciliarism, as the new religion of Vatican II putting man in the place of God, is error and imperfection, purely human, in no way divine. So the expression “Conciliar Church” means the Catholic Church in its purely human and imperfect aspect, the Church as disfigured by modern man organising Vatican II to put himself in the place of God. Yet the divine Church remains stainless beneath all the disfigurement, as if it were a kingfisher swooping down on a lake to pick up a fish and fly again heavenward, flicking off as it flies any water it momentarily picked up.

Then there are two Churches? No way. There is only the one immaculate Bride of Christ. Then does the expression “Conciliar Church” have no real meaning? Alas, it names an all too real reality. It names all those members and structures of the one true Church as caught up in the toils of the subtle errors of Vatican II, and as tending all the time to be taken out of the true Church by those errors. This is the “Conciliar Church” from which Archbishop Lefebvre did not mind being “excommunicated,” because, as he said, he never belonged to it in the first place.

Kyrie eleison.

Juvenal Again

Juvenal Again on November 29, 2008

Last week “Eleison Comments” drew attention to the remarkable (in a pagan) natural wisdom in matters spiritual of the Roman satirist Juvenal, who was in his prime about 100 years after Our Lord was born, but who is not known (as far as I can discover) for any contact with the Catholic religion then rising in Rome.

A first lesson drawn from the passage concluding the Tenth Satire was that grace is in line with that God-given nature of ours from which Juvenal was working. Grace is only out of line with our fallen nature, which fell with Adam and has ever since been flawed with original sin in all of us, making all too easy the succession of our personal sins. On this sinful nature, as sinful, grace does make war, but only to heal and elevate that God-given nature which necessarily underlies the sinful nature, as some apple necessarily underlies the rot of any rotten apple. That Juvenal with no apparent help from grace could write so well not only of human rot but also of the underlying nature refutes the dreadful heresy that there is nothing in human nature which is not rotten.

A second lesson for our own times was that the ancient pagan satirist who promoted natural sanity even without any notion of supernatural grace, was a better man than the mass of apostate post-Christian pagans who are today rotting and rooting out both nature and grace. Similarly, to one who visited a week ago the Washington DC Museum of Modern Art, the current exhibition of ancient artistic pieces from pagan Pompeii offered much more for the human heart and mind than did all the modern exhibits put together.

A third lesson, accentuated by modern times, might be the value of reading the classical Latin authors, such as Juvenal. When it comes to the learning of Latin, some pious souls argue that Catholic youth should be immersed rather in the abundant Latin texts of the grace-filled Church Fathers than in pagans like Juvenal. True, the Church Fathers are stainless where pagan authors are always more or less stained, but precisely because the Fathers are filled with grace, surely they cannot in the same way testify to that God-given nature in us which is prior in being, not in value, to God-given grace. Does not this nature need today all the help it can get?

Kyrie eleison.