Thursday, December 29, 2005
BENEDICT ON ORIGINAL SIN
as quoted at the Novus Ordo website:
What [Cdl.] Ratzinger says:
"The question of what it means to say that baptism is necessary for salvation has become ever more hotly debated in modern times. The Second Vatican Council said on this point that men who are seeking for God and who are inwardly striving toward that which constitutes baptism will also receive salvation. That is to say that a seeking after God already represents an inward participation in baptism, in the Church, in Christ.
To that extent, the question concerning the necessity of baptism for salvation seems to have been answered, but the question about children who could not be baptized because they were aborted then presses upon us that much more urgently.
Earlier ages had devised a teaching that seems to me rather unenlightened. They said that baptism endows us, by means of sanctifying grace, with the capacity to gaze upon God. Now, certainly, the state of original sin, from which we are freed by baptism, consists in a lack of sanctifying grace. Children who die in this way are indeed without any personal sin, so they cannot be sent to hell, but, on the other hand, they lack sanctifying grace and thus the potential for beholding God that this bestows. They will simply enjoy a state of natural blessedness, in which they will be happy. This state people called limbo.
In the course of our century, that has gradually come to seem problematic to us. This was one way in which people sought to justify the necessity of baptizing infants as early as possible, but the solution is itself questionable. Finally, the Pope [John Paul II] made a decisive turn in the [1995] encyclical Evangelium Vitae, a change already anticipated by the [1992] Catechism of the Catholic Church, when he expressed the simple hope that God is powerful enough to draw to himself all those who were unable to receive the sacrament."
--Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God and the World, pp. 401-402
Proof: To view scanned copies of these two pages of this book, please click: Page 401 Page 402
How much "inwardly striving" is enough? How much is too little? Is a promoter of esoteric Christianity striving sufficiently? Seems like this new theology on original sin raises its own set of commplications. Not to mention the fact that it contradicts the Tradition of the Church, as demonstrated over at Novus Ordo Watch where the relevent quotes can be found below this above quote from Cdl. Ratzinger. "Infallibility," it would seem, is revocable. Where is this revocability defined? It would appear that Pope opposes Pope or Pope opposes Council. Not only on this front, either.
Or are we moving to pluriform truth?
Houston, we have a problem...
