Some advice to the Pope: stop talking so much.
Reuters, one of the many mouthpieces of Conventional Wisdom, reported on the Pope's visit to Benin and snippets of his speeches, etc. Sorrow over the crusades was mentioned. Since that stuff irks me, I went looking for the original text. And found it on the Vatican website...along with a ton of other speeches and homilies and letters and messages from this African trip.
God, so much blather.
The Popes of the Renaissance and Middle Ages were often criticized for aping the ways of other royal courts in Europe. Nothing has changed. Like all the other states of our world, the Vatican is a huge opinion-text producer, with tons of papal statements via either the Pope himself or the endless departments of the bureaucracy, holding forth on everything you can imagine. I'll bet that the collected works of the Latin Fathers of the Church in Migne wouldn't equal one year of combined pontifical pontificating.
Ex Cathedra Rome should take a lesson from Ex Cathedra San Francisco and limit himself to one or two pithy and insightful paragraphs a day...but he should probably skip the pictures of naked men.
1 comment:
Perhaps for this reason Aquinas forbids the popes to teach, and restricts them to composing statements (creeds, confessions; symboli) of the faith: Summa theologiae 2-2 q1 a10. Not the rulers but the teachers (e.g. Athanasius, op. cit.) are the teachers of the church (1 q1 a8 Repl. Obj. 2)
Doctrine is for bishops to accept (1 q1 a8 sed contra); bishops' service to doctrine is in ruling with a view to catholic doctrine, e.g. dismissing professors who teach contrary to the faith.
... For example, the statement of 219 mistaken Aristotelian propositions by Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, in 1277. An excellent summary of Aristotelian doctrine which as put out there helps get all junior hierophants up to speed. The bishop leaves matters to the Aristotelian intellectuals to explain these propositions, whether or not they might have wish'd to do so so early.
Rather similar to Luther's publication that Thomas and Aristotle do not agree on the meaning of ousia and accident (Babylonian Captivity of the Church, on the Lord's Supper). The Aristotelian Church or band of intellectuals presumably did not wish to have this disagreement publish'd right up front. Let them then explain this disagreement to their pupils.
Or that it is only according to "vulgar Marxism" that economics determines superstructure including especially the state. What refutation have the Marxist intellectuals that this doesn't Marxist doctrine à la dialectical materialism? Well, it's "vulgar," rather than aesthetically refined, as revolutionary socialist strugglers in a political contest with the bourgeoisie for ownership ought to be.
P.S. About your other posting today, whether Anglican Christianity is "Protestant." It is proved not Protestant in this way:
1. There's always been hostility Puritans, Calvinists and biblicism in the Anglican Church, e.g. Elizabeth 1, who had to accept Puritans only because the pope excommunicated her, absolved all her subjects of the duty of obedience to her, and invited any Catholic monarch who wish'd to to conquer her realm and kill her.
2. This hostility to Calvin and biblicism can be deem'd "true" Anglicanism, which is thus "catholic" or "Catholic" Christianity.
3. Not that this true Anglicanism is subject to Roman authority (unless the bishop of Rome decides to re-package his authority as the mere right to preside at any gathering of bishops), still less to Tridentine doctrine and even still less to Aquinas.
4. True Anglicanism is thus dismissive of any sort of naive biblicism, and really is Celtic or Brytonic anonymous Christianity hardly more than the liturgy, perhaps re-adjusted to congrue with patterns of supposedly chthonic pagan rites still practised in the English countryside (as the Englishman Robert Graves opines in "The White Goddess," in strong preference vs any sort of biblicism).
5. Calvinism or protestantism has always been an interloper in English Christianity, as indeed have been Roman authority claims and any inclination to teach Aquinas.
6. Q.E.D.
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