Sunday, September 04, 2005
THE WAGES OF SIN AND BLAMING GOD
Interesting reading at Mass today given the events of this past week.
If I say to the wicked man, You shall surely die; and you do not warn him or speak out to disuade him from his wicked conduct so that he may live: that wicked man shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death. If, on the other hand, you have warned the wicked man, yet he has not turned away from his evil nor from his wicked conduct, then he shall die for his sin, but you shall save your life. (Esekiel 3:18-19)
Can the same be said of a culture? Are we obliged to point out when a city strays from the ways of God? Does God permit a culture to accrue the wages of the sin that takes part within it? Does God dispense justice and chastisement?
My pastor's homily today included the warnings of war issued at Fatima, and the fact that those warnings proved valid in the form of World War I and World War II. He spoke of taking note of warnings in apparitions, but only those which have the approval of the Church.
A reader sent in a quote from the blog "Pontifications" which addressed the topic of "Blaming God." This is the quote, though I haven't been able to locate it in the Pontifications blog:
"Indeed the situation in New Orleans and the surrounding states is catastrophic. Hopefully we will not blame God. From Schillebeeckx’s, Church: The Human Story of God,
Crossroad, 1993, p.91 (softcover)
“Christians must give up a perverse, unhealthy and inhuman doctrine of predestination without in so doing making God the great scapegoat of history” . “Nothing is determined in advance: in
nature there is chance and determinism; in the world of human activity there is possibility of free choices. Therefore the historical future is not known even to God; otherwise we
and our history would be merely a puppet show in which God holds the strings. For God, too, history is an adventure, an open history for and of men and women.”
Is the (historical ?) future known to God?
CCC 2115: God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints.
If God can reveal it, He must by necessity know it. Does He have sovereignty over it?
CCC 269: The Holy Scriptures repeatedly confess the universal power of God....He is the Lord of the universe, whose order he established and which remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal. He is master of history, governing hearts and events in keeping with his will...
CCC 301: With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves. He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end.
CCC 306: God is the sovereign master of his plan.
From the Baltimore Catechism:
#171: God sees us and watches over us
#173: God knows all things, even our most secret thoughts, words, and actions.
#174: God can do all things, and nothing is hard or impossible to Him.
#177: God must be just as well as merciful because He must fulfil His promise to punish those who merit punishment, and because He cannot be infinite in one perfection without being infinite in all.
#178: The forgetfulness of God's justice will lead us into sins of presumption.
#211: God did not leave all things to themselves after He had created them; He continues to preserve and govern them.
##212: We call the care by which God preserves and governs the world and all it contains His providence.
Those entries should be sufficient to enable us to conclude that God does control the weather.
From the Catechism of the Council of Trent:
Pg. 29-30: We are not, however, to understand that God is in such wise the Creator and Maker of all things that His works, when once created and finished, could thereafter continue to exist unsupported by His omnipotence. For as all things derive existence from the Creator's supreme power, wisdom, and goodness, so unless preserved continually by His Providence, and by the same power which produced them, they would instantly return into their nothingness. This the Scriptures declare when they say "How could anything endure if thou wouldst not? or be preserved, if not called by three?"
Not only does God protect and govern all things by His Providence, but He also by an internal power impels to motion and action whatever moves and acts, and this in such a manner that, although He excludes not, He yet precedes the agency of secondary causes. For His invisible influence extends to all things, and, as the Wise Man says, reaches "from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly." This is the reason why the Apostle, announcing to the Athenians the God whom, not knowing, they adored, said: He is "not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and are."
If "He precedes the agency of secondary causes" we must also conclude that He has command of secondary causes. We have evidence that God controls the weather in the Scripture passage where Jesus calms the storm.
When I glanced through the Pontifications blog, it appeared to be attempting to promote orthodoxy. Yet the choice of Schillebeeckx’s work as a source is curious.
Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, S.V.D., author of THE RHINE FLOWS INTO THE TIBER, an account of the inner workings of the Second Vatican Council, has this to say of Schillebeeckx.
Before the opening of the Council the schemas which would constitute the topics discussed during the Council were being reviewed by the Council Fathers at the request of Pope John. Wiltgen writes:
Shortly thereafter, seventeen Dutch bishops met at 's-Hertogenbosch, at the invitation of Bishop Willem Bekkers, to discuss the schemas. There was a general dissatisfaction with the first four dogmatic constitutions, entitled "Sources of Revelation," Preserving Pure the Deposit of Faith," "Christian Moral Order," and "Chastity, Matrimony, the Family and Virginity," and general agreement that the fifth, on the liturgy, was the best. The proposal was then discussed and approved that a commentary should be prepared, and be widely distributed among the Council Fathers, pointing out the weaknesses of the dogmatic constitutions, and suggesting that the schema on the liturgy be placed first on the Council agenda.
In effect, the only author of the resulting commentary, published anonymously, was Father Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., a Belgian-born professor of dogmatics at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, who served as the leading theologian for the Dutch hierarchy. It contained a devastating criticism of the four dogmatic constitutions, which were charged with representing only one school of theological thought. Only the fifth schema, on the liturgy, was described as "an admirable piece of work."
It should be noted that the liturgical movement had been active in Europe for several decades, and that quite a large number of the bishops and periti from the Rhine countries had been appointed by Pope John to the preparatory commission on liturgy. As a result, they had succeeded in inserting their ideas in the schema and gaining approval for what they considered a very acceptable document. (p. 22-23)
Still another consequence of the priority given to the debate on the liturgy was that Father Schillebeeckx and other opponents of the four dogmatic constitutions were given ample time to pinpoint the inadequacies of those texts and to demand their complete revision. (p. 35)
As early as the second session, wrote Father Schillebeeckx, he had told a peritus on the Theological Commission that he was sorry to see in the schema what appeared to be the moderate liberal view on collegiality; he personally was in favor of the extreme liberal view. (p. 242)
A website which discusses the Second Vatican Council and Wiltgen's book has this to say of Schillebeeckx:
The majority of the Fathers present were Church dignitaries rather than theologians and hence were heavily dependent upon the periti or experts who were almost invariably in the neo-modernist camp. A list of these periti would include almost all the heretical theologians of the post-Conciliar Church, such men as Charles Davis, Hans Kung, Gregory Baum, Edward Schillebeeckx, Bernard Haring, Y. Congar, Karl Rahner and Rene Laurentin.
Another website discussing the Council states:
Monsignor Rudlolf Bandas, a peritus at the Council, acknowledged that allowing suspect theologians at Vatican II (such as Schillebeeckx and Kung) was a grave mistake
But perhaps the most damning commentary on the Catholicism of Fr. Schillebeeckx comes from a non-Catholic source--Wikipedia--where you will find him listed among the liberal theologians in an entry titled "Liberal Christianity."
Enough said.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
UPDATE
Here is the location of the above quote in the Pontifications blog. Turns out it's in a combox. See the first comment to this post.
