HOW COME FAITH WAS NEVER ATTAINED.
Before he became Pope, the holy father wrote the ‘Ratzinger Report’ where he outlined the ‘Crisis in the Church’ and described it as a crisis of Faith.’ This was not due to lost of Faith but due to the inability of souls to make an act of Faith. The solution is not renewal because there is nothing to renew. It must be evangelization because it is teaching everything from the beginning.
Fr. Servais Pinckners, a Moral Theologian tried to pin point what might have happened; how come very, very few were making the act of Faith.
Before the Council of Trent the Catholic Church was beginning to have serious problems. For one thing it was noticeable that after each Ecumenical Council there were always problems, even after the Council of Trent just as we have now. But before Trent, the heresy of Nominalism popularized by William was besieging the Church. This heresy was metamorphosing first, into Luther’s Protestantism and forking out into communism on one side and into democracy on the other. Both political philosophies have their origin from the heresy of Nominalism. Europe, specially France, was the experimental ground for these deviant philosophies. It tore Europe into fragments and was transplanted to the U.S. in its worst form. The Catholic Church was disintegrating in Europe. So the Council of Trent was summoned and basing her documents on the Fathers and Doctors of the Church plus her Tradition and Liturgy the Council made very good documents. But as we mentioned in the previous post, after the Council, the Dicasteries were in a hurry to implement the documents specially in Moral Theology. In rushing to train the priest with the new documents, specially the Diocesan priests in the seminaries, they did not follow the proper method of instruction.
The right procedure is this: theology professors must be contemplatives (i.e. they must be spiritually in the supernatural level having receive grace together with the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity and as a consequence their knowledge of Divine Revelation is infused or taught to them by God, Himself. And the seminary students must be taught, not the truths of Divine Revelation, but how to rise up to the supernatural level spiritually where it is God who would teach them. In the rush the theology instructor who were merely in the natural level (bogged down in the spirituality of the Old Testament) were attempting to teach seminarians who were likewise in the natural level. Strictly speaking both were not in the level of grace and devoid of supernatural Faith. The blind leading the blind.
As a consequence theology professors who were spiritually in the natural level were attempting to teach supernatural truths that they could not explain to students who were in the natural level who could not understand supernatural truths. The fault of theological professors was that in not being contemplatives thus not having the infused knowledge of Divine Revelation, they were explaining supernatural truths using words of Scriptures but explained by giving merely its natural dictionary meaning and not its deep, penetrating meaning as meant by God. It is exactly how the Protestants do it. They explain the words of God without giving what God really meant but by giving only the natural dictionary meaning. This is giving the seminarians a natural understanding of Divine Revelation and this is not Faith because this is not evangelization. Yet the theology professor and the seminarian after the lecture have the deceitful feeling that they had lectured and listened to a supernatural truth of the Catholic Church….thus the feeling that they had faith, that they are inside the Catholic Church and will attain eternal life. Poor souls. And this wrong method is carried on continuously up to the very present hour.
This first defect mentioned by Pope Benedict in his ‘new evangelization’ is still in the ‘Instrumentum Laboris’ for the bishop’s synod this October. If it is not corrected very few will ever reach Faith in this scheduled ‘Year of Faith.’ What a waste.Why don’ we just all follow Pope Benedict’s schema that he had already presented? The Bishop’s schema is full of beautiful words describing natural realities. If given to the people we will all feel as if we have been fed with supernatural truths when actually we were only fed with natural food. The Bread of life was nowhere except in words describing a mere bread.
Christ is the Bread of Life. The manna that fed the body was just a type. The Bread of Life are the sound teachings of Divine Revelation the fruit of which is an innocent mind. Who is Christ? The Bread of Life that will give us Eternal life if we eat the Bread of Life. And the eating of the Bread of life is FAITH, the reason Pope Benedict is so insistent.