Monday, May 23, 2005
IT’S SIMPLY ILLOGICAL
Once the Church makes a pronouncement on something, it cannot be changed.
That is the argument against women’s ordination. The same argument is presented at KLTV on the subject of birth control.
A blog reader sent in the following comments in email, and since they are my concerns as well, I’d like to bring them up:
The older papal statements about non-Catholic religions always made
clear the belief that these sects hold principles of faith and morals that
are in themselves false, harmful to the soul, and an impediment to one's
chances for salvation. This is what seems to me to have collapsed
completely in the modern papacy. The way I have put it before is that
the previous Pope, for example, was very stern about Catholics not doing or
believing certain things, but if an Anglican or a Muslim believed or
did them it was no big deal, and certainly no jeopardy to their salvation.
What we end up with then seemingly is two sets of morality, one for
Catholics and one for everyone else. The "Splendor of Truth" becomes
something that Catholics are required to bask in, and it may be
proposed to anyone else who cares to read the encyclical, but if you don't get
it fine. God won't really care. Any real urgency to conversion is thus
dissipated in my view.
“God won’t really care.” Yes, that is the message of the Assisi event. That is the message of inculturation at Mass. That is the message of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. With dialogue particularly, all religions have equal status at the dialogue table, as Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict has said.
Yet regular readers will remember that I’ve posted passages from encyclicals that present this concept of the exclusivity of the Catholic faith. What’s more, Dominus Iesus also makes the claim of exclusivism. This is what the Church has Traditionally taught. The operative word was “heresy” which seems to have been eliminated from the most recent revision of the Code of Canon Law.
Now we can dabble in other religious faiths and practices, and that is precisely what we are doing more and more of. Nuns tout Buddhist prayer and meditation. Hindus conduct their own service in the chapel at Fatima. People come to Mass in strange costumes representing the beliefs of other cultures. In short, we make nice everywhere we go, excluding no religion or religious practice as beyond the pale.
So, if we can break with our Tradition in this area that is so vital to the health of the faith, why do we have to retain the birth control encyclical as infallible and never to be changed? Why can’t women be ordained? If we break with the teaching of one encyclical, we can break with them all. None of them are sacred if some of them are not.
No one has a good explanation of this. As the reader quoted above indicated in email, when this is brought up there is a screaming silence all around. If this is beyond logic, why aren’t more people pointing that out?
