Communion by degree, revisited

Given recent events, I thought it worthwhile to re-issue this three-year-old post and ask for opinions from thoughtful Catholics.

Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is anti-men's-rights, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, John Allen has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.

Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.

One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.

Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.

It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus: "outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (LG §13).

Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect (UR §3).

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG §16).

The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, not culpable for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church's explanation of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in "imperfect" communion with the Church. Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.

That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.

It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of Pontifications, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay Development and Negation. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation outside the Church; it's another to say what being inside the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree. That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.

What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how non-Catholics can be in some degree of communion with the Church, but how Catholics themselves can fail to in full communion—and why that matters.

The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, rightly and in considerable detail, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. 1 Cor 11: 23-30). If they are thus and culpably not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.

Now even Catholics who only formally cooperate with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are guilty of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.

On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is objectively culpable for not being in full communion with the Church, the appearance of full communion on their part is generally kept up.

Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place. And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.

It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better and the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some especially trenchant things to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.

But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.

Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced a bracing document which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.

People, I'm religious but not "spiritual"

I just had to say that in this medium, as I once did on Facebook. The consternation I aroused there bodes well for the traffic I hope to get here. But my saying it here and now is not just lust for vainglory.

This morning I saw a tweet from The Anchoress that called for more than the ten seconds I usually devote to tweets. It linked to an article by one Lillian Daniel, a minister of the United Church of Christ—that bastion of all things PC—entitled "Spiritual but Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me." I'm delighted to find a liberal-Protestant minister who's knowledgeable enough about this sort of thing to be bored by it. Rev. Daniels dealt with her boredom by producing that article for a website aimed at the more engaged among her co-religionists. I deal with mine by determinedly affirming the opposite of the slogan that bores me. But the article itself piqued my interest because, as I had hoped, it perfectly explains what's behind the all-too-American phenomenon of "spirituality" without "religion."

From her plane's seat, Daniels wrote (emphasis added):

Thank you for sharing, spiritual-but-not-religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.

Exactly. For wisdom about and love of things divine, I need to trust the transgenerational assembly (ecclesia) of people I worship with far more than I trust myself. I may not trust the old lady next to me in the pew at Mass more than myself—she of the blue hair, the off-key singing, the suspicious scowl. I certainly don't look to that guy at the other end of the pew, that middle-aged used-car salesman sporting a beer belly and an oleaginous grin. And I do have an almost-unbreakable habit of imagining how much better a job I could do than the priest up there—or than our bishop, for that matter. But what I do trust, far more than myself or them, is who and what we all love, and what it all represents. I don't want to make God in my own image any more than I want to make him in the image of the average layperson or clergyman. What I want is what we all know we need to be a part of: the Body of Christ. That includes more than his Risen body in heaven. It includes even more than the Eucharist. Necessarily, it includes the Church, which St. Paul did after all call "the Body of Christ." Extra ecclesiam nulla salus is a dogma because we can be incorporated into Christ only through his Body, the Church.

That's the essential point utterly missed by the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd: those who want God without his people, Christ without his Church in all her challenging and irritating concreteness. The spiritual-but-not-religious can hardly avoid idolatry. Recoiling from the human imperfections of God's people, especially those of the leadership, they will settle only for a God who conforms to their ideas of what's appropriate, rather than vice-versa. And that's why I call myself "religious but not spiritual." I want to awaken people to the idolatry they confuse with integrity. That way, they might stop boring me.

Ecclesial Consumerism

Over at Called to Communion, one of my favorite blogs, Bryan Cross has posted a rather amusing meditation on and critique of "ecclesial consumerism." If you read it, you will probably enjoy yourself as much as I did. But there's a serious theological point here. If there weren't, there'd be no point in making the criticism.

One thing worth stressing about Bryan's post is the implication that Protestantism as such is defenseless against ecclesial consumerism. That's because the essence of Protestantism, seen in its countless manifestations, is to make the individual the judge of ecclesial orthodoxy, rather than to acknowledge a visible communion as "the" Church Christ founded, which would then be understood as the judge of any given individual's or group's orthodoxy. Of course there are many ways for individuals and their friends to go about becoming the judge of ecclesial orthodoxy. One way is solo scriptura: openly taking one's favored interpretation of Scripture as normative while denying that any ecclesial creed or confession is binding. Another is sola scriptura: treating Scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith, but acknowledging some ecclesial creed or confession as an authoritative but fallible interpretation of Scripture. Or one could go beyond Scripture alone, taking the hermeneutically significant "sources" to include non-canonical documents of the early Church, liturgy, saints, mystical experience, and so forth. But in the end, it all comes down to the same thing.  Once one accepts the Protestant principle, no church is recognized as "the" Church, the judge of one's own orthodoxy, so that one ends up choosing a church based solely on one's personal opinions and preferences. Those can be weighty or light, serious or silly; but ultimately, they are not normative for anything recognizable as "the" Church. They have no more authority for Christians at large than one's grocery list has for one's fellow shoppers.

That said, contemporary Catholics exhibit their own styles of ecclesial consumerism. And that's amply pointed out in the combox discussion to Bryan's post, whose participants consist mostly of Catholics. To their observations, I shall add my own. I'm sure somebody could learn from them.

As a cradle Catholic who reverted to the Church in college, I've noticed that many Catholics who care enough about their faith to attend church regularly will pick a parish based mostly on what they're "comfortable" with. Most don't want to be challenged. Sometimes, that inertial resistance has to do with doctrine, but it needn't and often doesn't. For example, I've been a regular churchgoer for decades, but aside from the three years when I worked as a paid DRE, I've never been asked by any parish representative, clerical or lay, what I actually believe. People care a lot more about how well I sing, how much money I give or fail to give, and how close to the entrance I am when I light up one of my cigarillos outside before or after Mass. I also get asked a fair amount where my wife and kids are, which is rather embarrassing given that I've been a divorced, non-custodial parent for years. Once that info comes out, people assume I'm there looking for a cute single woman who's probably going to be half my age. As if I'm stupid enough to cause myself even more trouble.

Then there's the theological angle among certain committed minorities. Many of the "progressives" on the Left and "traditionalists" on the Right judge Rome by a hermeneutic of discontinuity or "rupture" (as the Pope once put it). The progs task Rome for betraying Vatican II by reactionary retrenchment, and the trads task Rome for failing to do just that. Thus we get, on the one hand, "progressive" parishes that emphasize "social justice" and "contemporary" hymnody but cast aside the doctrines pertaining to the pelvis. On the other hand, we see communities of "traditional" Catholics who not only celebrate the "Extraordinary Form" of the Roman Rite but want the Church at large to carry on as though Vatican II and all that nasty 60s stuff never happened. Of course, the right-wing discontinuants and the left-wing discontinuants will have no truck with each other. It's as if there were two different churches, not in communion with each other, yet still residing under the umbrella of the Great Church. Which is why the whole phenomenon is a particularly subtle instance of ecclesial consumerism.

Now the Catholic Church, being as big and as...well, catholic as she is, will always harbor considerable differences of culture, opinion, and praxis. But at least there's a vital center to say what is and is not beyond the pale. That center is not going away, as much as some Catholics want to see its authority reduced. And that is why it's possible for Catholics to transcend ecclesial consumerism. All they have to do is be less American about church. Easier said than done, you might say—and indeed it is. We need to think of ourselves as Catholics first and Americans second. If we did, we'd gain the needed critical distance on consumerism, ecclesial or otherwise.

Secular Ecclesiology

In my online career, I have found that the issues sparking the longest debates are almost invariably ecclesiological, i.e., questions concerning the identity, nature, and authority of something called "the Church." At one time, that surprised me. I do, after all, address a range of philosophical and political as well as theological topics, many of which are are objectively more basic and comprehensive than that particular branch of theology. Yet with the possible exception of abortion—where philosophy, religion, and politics all converge—it's ecclesiology that evokes the most passion around here and in that part of the blogosphere I frequent. At the end I'll say why I think that is. But at the moment I'd like to focus on the latest ecclesiological twist in the news.

At the end of its recent term, the U.S. Supreme Court "...left standing a lower court ruling that will allow an Oregon man to try to hold the Vatican financially responsible for his sexual abuse by a priest, if he can persuade the court that the priest was an employee of the Holy See." For the legal details of the case, you can start by consulting the CNA story I've quoted. Legal eagles will doubtless know where to find the actual texts of the lower-court decision. Now as a decided non-lawyer, I find my eyes glazing over when faced with most legal questions. What interests me about this case is something I've observed in other recent developments at the interface of religion and politics: the idea that it's somehow up to the State to address ecclesiological questions in order to discern and carry out what is just in the civil sphere. In the U.S. today, the organ of the State most often involved in making such decisions is the judiciary. They don't do a good job of it: the incoherence of church-state jurisprudence in America since the 1940s is widely acknowledged. But they sure keep trying.

Of course there are people who think nothing untoward is going on with the present decision. If a victim of sexual abuse is to see justice done to him, then somebody has to be held accountable for the failure of justice to be done in the past. And if this were a case of negligence on the part of some corporation, NGO, or governmental body below the national level, there would be no question who would be liable. Under civil law, officers of such bodies can be held liable for negligence in their oversight and discipline of their "employees." The only exceptions are heads of state. Now in this case the negligence, if it that's what it was, was exhibited by clerical officials of the Catholic Church. Prima facie, the question seems simple: whether the relationship between a local American priest-and-religious and the Holy See is enough like that of employee-employer to justify treating the Pope like, say, the CEO of a multinational corporation rather than a head of state and his government, who are ordinarily immune from prosecution. Even the Obama Administration has taken the side of the Vatican in this one, arguing in a brief that the case does not call for making an exception to the usual rule of immunity for heads of state.

You won't find me disagreeing with that. Yet given that the Supreme Court has allowed the present suit and decision to stand, it is now up to a U.S. District Court to determine whether the priestly perp was in fact an "employee" of the Vatican in the sense necessary to establish civil liability. And that's what troubles me. In general, the relationship between a priest and/or religious and their ecclesiastical superiors is not the same as that of employee to employer. The relationship between such parties is not really that of contracting with each other to exchange labor for material compensation, though that occasionally happens within the context of a larger and more fundamental relationship. But such an occasion does not seem to have arisen in this case. The plaintiff's attorney argues that merely functioning as a priest or religious makes one an "employee" of the Vatican in the legally applicable sense of that term. If that argument is allowed to succeed, then a secular government will be deciding, to a hitherto unprecedented extent, on the hierarchical nature of the universal Church. In effect, Erastianism will have become American law. King Henry VIII would be delighted.

Some would think I'm exaggerating. To such folk, all that's at issue here is whether being a church leader exempts one from the ordinary legal requirement to turn suspected criminals under their authority over to the civil authorities. The pope, the bishops, and religious superiors were in authority over the priestly perp in question; ergo, they should be held legally accountable for their failure to do what they could and should have under the law. Now that actually holds at the local level. That is why many dioceses have had to make huge payouts to abuse victims for civil damages. But in this case, the argument assumes that the kind of authority that the Vatican has over priests and religious everywhere is enough like that of a multinational corporation over its employees to create a due presumption that the former should be treated like the latter. For without that presumption, the papacy cannot be held liable for failure to reign in the perp. So, if allowed to prevail, the plaintiff's argument would commit the United States to treating the pope as the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc.

What's disturbing here isn't just the falsity of such a belief. Even more disturbing is the appearance of such a belief within the wider context of belief among the Church's many critics. For most purposes, they don't want the pope to function as the CEO of Catholic Church, Inc. They don't want the Vatican to muzzle or dismiss priests and religious for expressing heretical views. They don't want the Vatican telling laity who procure or support abortion that they're excommunicated. They don't want priests refusing absolution to couples who contracept. Many, like the kings and nobles of old, want the very selection of bishops taken largely out of the papacy's hands. For most purposes, they don't want the Church to retain an exclusive right to decide which members to elevate, discipline, or expel. But when it comes to protecting kids, the Church has to be treated like any multinational that can fire or prosecute its people at will. And the scariest thing of all is that they see nothing inconsistent about that stance. They want the Church to have less authority than she claims, except when she doesn't claim it and they think she should have it.

That's what I call 'secular ecclesiology'. It's an important aspect of what the present pope meant by the memorable phrase, delivered to the 2005 conclave, "a dictatorship of relativism." What the loyal citizens of that dictatorship want is for the Church to stop telling people what she thinks is right and wrong and instead conform herself to their ideas of right and wrong. At bottom, it's a question of authority: specifically, who gets to to settle disputes about the identity, nature, and above all the authority of the Church herself?

That is the secular parallel to the formal divisions that have rent the Church since the beginning, but especially in the fifth, eleventh, and sixteenth centuries. The underlying ecclesiological question when dealing with "heresy" and "schism" is always who has the authority to decide, in a definitive manner binding the whole Church, what's orthodox and, as part of that, where the fullness of the Body of Christ resides. The main reason I'm Catholic, as distinct from Protestant or Orthodox, is that I believe only the Catholic Church, as she understands herself, has that sort of authority. Christians who are not Catholics, of course, deny that she does—or they would become Catholics with all deliberate speed. But I suspect that the present-day depredations of secular ecclesiology are facilitated, in large part, by the collective failure of Christians themselves to resolve their ecclesiological divisions. If we can't agree on where to locate the divinely given authority of the Church, or even on who is "the" Church, then we're practically inviting the State to subordinate institutional churches to itself. That has always been a problem for the Catholic Church to some extent. It's been even more of a problem for Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches.

This is not just a difficulty about how to relate religion and politics to each other. It's not even mere fodder for ecumenists. I believe that ecclesiology has the importance for Christians today that the great christological debates of the first millennium had for Christians then.

The disputes then were about who and what Jesus Christ is. The disputes now are about who and what the Church is. In one sense, the Church is the pilgrim People of God; the Church Militant is not yet what she is called to be. But in another sense, the Church is Jesus Christ himself; for as his Bride, she is one Body with him in a mystical marriage to be fully consummated only when the Bridegroom returns. Both disputes, the christological and the ecclesiological, are about how God becomes visible in the world. It's about how the Word is made flesh.

Whatever the answer to that question, it cannot be treated as a matter of opinion without being rendered merely political, and therefore idle. That is why Newman said: "No revelation is given, unless there be some authority to decide what is given." By that he did not mean that the Church, whoever and whatever that is, gets to decide for herself what the revelation from God in Christ is. He meant that, if we are to distinguish divine revelation from human opinion about what the "sources" thereof mean, then some visible and divinely established authority has to be able to settle doctrinal disputes in a definitive and binding manner.

Whoever that is, it's not the State. But not for nothing did Chesterton call the U.S. "a nation with the soul of a church." It is here that the question will come to a head.

Bad arguments against the Magisterium: Part II

In Part I of this series, I rebutted the argument that the Catholic Magisterium is "accountable" to nobody and nothing but itself. In this part, I shall rebut the argument that adherence to the Magisterium puts a Christian in no better a position to know the content of the deposit of faith than the major Christian alternatives

There are actually four main versions of that argument. The first runs roughly as follows:

Scripture and/or Tradition are fully public and materially contain the full content of the deposit of faith. The Magisterium claims to "infallibly" hand on and clarify the doctrinal content of those two "sources" of transmission of divine revelation. But whether infallible or not, the Magisterium only does the sort of thing that any Spirit-guided Christian could in principle do, given the publicity and material sufficiency of the sources. Therefore, such a magisterium is in principle dispensable.

The problem with that argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. To get it to follow, one needs at least the following, additional premise:

(i) Some methodology other than binding and (allegedly) infallible interpretation by ecclesiastical authority enables the Spirit-guided Christian, at least in principle, to attain sufficient knowledge of the deposit of faith from Scripture and/or Tradition.

Many people, mostly Protestants, believe (i) either because their personal religious experience leads them to believe they've attained such knowledge without the Church, or because they believe that otherwise there would be no way to assess the orthodoxy of any self-proclaimed magisterium, Catholic or otherwise. But the problem with (i) is that there is no good reason to believe it.

The only good reason to believe (i) would be to hit upon a methodology, ecclesiologically neutral in itself, which objectively suffices to render a particular hermeneutic of Scripture and/or Tradition doctrinally comprehensive and rationally compelling. But if nearly two millennia of exegesis and theology show anything at all, they show that there is no such methodology. Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, has never claimed there is such a methodology; it has always insisted, like Catholicism, that authentic interpretation of the sources can only be conducted in conformity with the mind of "the Church." And Protestants who claim there is such a methodology often disagree about which doctrinal results are thereby secured. That's why there are Protestant "denominations." Rather few of the Protestant participants in that debate can be charged with outright irrationality; with more or less plausibility, they just disagree among themselves as well as with Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Absent appeal to an infallible interpreter, that leaves the question who is right as a matter of opinion rather than of binding doctrine. But that does not suffice for identifying the entire content of the deposit of faith as an object of the assent, precisely, of faith in God the infallible Revealer. All it does is present Scripture (and a fortiori Tradition, of which Scripture is the uniquely normative written record) as raw material for the forming of more or less plausible opinions. Many such opinions are doubtless logically equivalent to doctrines that are of faith; but as opinions, they neither constitute nor express assent by faith.

That points up the fundamental difficulty with the argument in question: there is no ecclesiologically neutral methodology for determining who interprets Scripture correctly, and who thus knows their interpretations to be binding and irreformable for the whole Church's assent of faith as distinct from tentative opinions. Some Christians appeal to a "burning in the bosom" or to their holy people of choice to confirm their interpretations; but such inherently subjective arguments can yield nothing that is rationally compelling and authoritative for the Church as a whole, without an ad hoc and doctrinally front-loaded limitation on who counts as "the Church."

In view of such difficulties, some people argue against the Magisterium's claims in a narrower way. Thus:

The Magisterium enables Christians to know the full content of the deposit of faith as an object for the assent of faith only if the doctrines it presents as binding and irreformable can be demonstrated to belong to the apostolic faith. But the most distinctively Catholic doctrines, including the Magisterium's claims for itself, are precisely those which cannot be thus demonstrated. Therefore, the Magisterium does not help Christians know the full content of the deposit of faith as an object for the assent of faith.

The difficulty with that argument is that it begs the question at the outset. How? If the first sentence is true, then we can assess the Magisterium's claims for itself only if we can reliably know the content of the deposit of faith "given once for all to the holy ones" without recourse to the Magisterium's claims for itself. Hence, the Magisterium as it understands itself is justifiable only if superfluous for knowing the rest of the deposit of faith. But if the Magisterium is superfluous in that way, then its claim to be the sole "authentic" interpreter of the sources is false. An argument that begs the question at the outset need not be taken seriously as an argument.

That's probably why many non-Catholic Christians prefer a more philosophical approach. For purposes of a blog post, a good example is the argument made by a commentator over at Called to Communion:

What good Protestant theologians actually believe is that a sincere believer, aided by the Holy Spirit, who approaches the Scripture with humility in the context of a living community of faith and the Christian Tradition will be able to find great confidence about those truths necessary to salvation and to grow, however slowly and fallibly, closer to the truth on more doubtful matters. This fallibility is inherent to our situation as human beings and is in no way mitigated by your Catholic position since you have fallibly determined that organizational and doctrinal continuity with the Apostles is a guide to doctrinal reliability, and you have fallibly determined that the Church of Rome exhibits such continuity. Finally, you fallibly interpret the Roman Church’s doctrinal proclamations. Adding the infallibility of the Church generally or the Pope specifically will not get you into a significantly better epistemic state than the agreed upon doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture.

In other words: since the assent of faith is up to each individual, and each individual is fallible, then the assent of faith is itself fallible; and if so, then proposing some set of doctrines S with alleged infallibility gives people no more certainty of the truth of S than would holding S as a set of human opinions only.

John Henry Newman's well-known rejection of "private judgement" in religion is often criticized in such a manner. Thus if the assent of faith as an epistemic stance is fallible, given the fallibility of each of the assenters, then ultimately there is no reliable way to distinguish the objective content of the irreformable deposit of faith, as revealed by God, from fallible opinions, held collectively by members of "the Church," about the data handed down to us. If the purpose of the self-styled Magisterium is to afford us a reliable way to make that distinction, then the Magisterium is wasting its own and everybody else's time. For what it's after is something that cannot be had and therefore should not be sought.

Now if the Magisterium were offering its definitive judgments merely as products of academic research, or even of special religious experiences, that criticism would be perfectly justified. And such factors often play a important role in forming magisterial judgments, as well as an even more important role in defending them. Yet no matter how well they serve, they could not themselves be decisive without the Magisterium's claims for itself succumbing to the objection at hand. What's decisive among and for the Magisterium's claims is its claim that it is divinely authorized, to the same degree as the Apostles themselves, to teach doctrine which irreformably binds the whole Church and is, by that same divine authority, protected from teaching what is false when it does so. If that is true, then the inherent fallibility of believers who take the Magisterium at its word does not infect the truth of what they assent to when they make the assent of faith; it infects only their degree of understanding that truth. Assuming Christianity is true, the fact remains that no particular believer, not even the pope, can ever be absolutely certain that their own understanding of a particular doctrine is as free from error as the doctrine itself. Rather, and as a matter of fact, they trust implicitly that the doctrine is true and seek to conform their mind ever more closely with that of the Church, for which the Magisterium speaks, on the doctrine's subject matter. Of course, if the Magisterium's particular claims for itself are true, then "the Church" as a whole will enjoy, or in due course attain, as sound an understanding of the doctrine as the subject matter permits. But that doesn't guarantee that any believer in particular will do so. That is one reason why the Catholic Church tolerates a great deal of what is, objectively speaking, material heresy in her ranks. It is often humanly impossible to tell which errors are being made in good faith, by people who (mistakenly) believe they are conforming their minds to that of the Church, from those which arise from culpable refusal to so conform oneself. Although the content of the deposit of faith is not a journey, most of us know that the life of faith is very much a journey. Accordingly, the position of the believing, intelligent Catholic is rather similar to that which our CtoC commenter attributed to "good Protestant theologians." The only difference is that the Catholic acknowledges a living authority not merely for identifying the deposit of faith—for which inspired Scripture indubitably serves—but for definitively resolving, as they arise, certain questions that the sources either occasion or fail to address explicitly.

Nevertheless, the journey would be not just unavoidable, but irremediably deficient, if the fourth and final common argument against the Magisterium were sound. Thus:

The Magisterium claims to be the sole "authentic" interpreter of Scripture and Tradition, meaning that only its interpretations are divinely authorized for the assent and profession of the whole Church. But all language requires interpretation, especially when it's about such lofty subject matter; so, the Magisterium's interpretations, in the form of dogmas or other definitive teachings, themselves require interpretation by both individual believers equipped to conduct it and the Magisterium itself. But if that is the case, then given the subject matter, there's no reason to believe that magisterial judgments, offered as interpretations of the "sources," are any more perspicuous than what they interpret. That is why heresies are so frequent, even recurring in new forms, despite conciliar and papal definitions; and that's how the interpretation of certain doctrines, such as extra ecclesiam nulla salus, can changes over time. But if magisterial judgments set forth with alleged infallibility leave so much unclarity, then the Magisterium's claims for itself are idle.

Fortunately, that is the easiest argument to rebut. Magisterial judgments rarely answer all important questions about their subject matter, any more than Scripture does; they answer only the questions that are, or were, pressing in their historical context. Hence, such judgments are ordinarily not the last word for understanding what they're about; they are merely interpretive steps deemed necessary for dispelling particular misunderstandings. Ordinarily they do that job well, even though sometimes they do not, and can even raise serious questions of their own—as, I believe, was the case with the filioque, whose que admits of heterodox interpretations as well as an orthodox one. The point is this: even though the Church's collective meditation on the deposit of faith does not exhaust the cognitive content of the subject, and could never come close to doing so, the words in which magisterial judgments are framed are typically clear enough, in the broader context of Tradition and history, to exclude problematic interpretations as they arise. The Magisterium itself is on a faith journey of sorts, and the history of doctrine may be seen as that of an ongoing conversation about which direction the journey should take. But once a certain direction is taken definitively, interpretive clarity is thus gained to some degree.

Living the Trinity and swimming the Tiber

Among Westerners these days, it has become commonplace to identify oneself as "spiritual but not religious." When people repeat that slogan, they generally mean to affirm some sort of relationship with a Higher Power apart from, and often in contradistinction to, institutionally embodied religion. Thus it is assumed that something called "the Church" obscures more than it transmits the most important truths about the scheme of things. But of course, if there is such a thing as divine revelation, as each of the Abrahamic religions claim, then its content cannot be merely a matter of personal opinion. Either it is reliably and publicly identifiable in authoritative terms, or it is not identifiable as divine revelation at all, but only as a set of data—legendary, historical, and speculative—about which various opinions can be entertained. Even Hindus recognize that much. After a long eclipse of dogma, many educated Christians are rediscovering it too. The latest to catch my attention is C of E priest Fr. Jeffrey Steel, who has just announced that he is "swimming the Tiber." I want to connect what he's done with my favorite dogma of the Faith: the Trinity.

The dogma of the Trinity expresses that infinite, bedrock Reality from which everything else, even the Incarnation, is derived: a communion of persons who are each the same God. To us, that can only seem paradoxical; we cannot expect ever to "comprehend" it, to "wrap our minds round" it, in terms of something else; like St. Patrick or St. Augustine, we can only approach it cognitively with analogies whose inadequacy quickly becomes apparent. That's because there is no more fundamental reality in terms of which the Trinity can be explained; rather, its activity explains everything else. But its life, timeless yet dynamic, is what we are called to live as, verily, "partakers of the divine nature." So the best path to the Trinity is to accept its reality by humble submission to the Church founded by Christ; to worship it in awe, which also requires humility; and to live as Christ the Lord would have us live: loving ourselves and one another as we are loved, which requires suffering. As the New Testament indicates, we are to do so as members of that communion of persons called the Church: the Mystical Body of Christ. And so the question becomes: what is "the" Church founded by Christ? Only when we have found the Church and joined her do the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit abide in us as fully as they will. It is thus that we are "saved," drawn out of darkness into God's marvelous light.

Yet for the reason already adumbrated, many would reject the question: What is "the" Church? They think of churches as essentially political associations of the like-minded; hence, there are only churches one might find, or fail to find, congenial as loci of opinion and mutual support. On the purely human level, such a view is all too plausible. But judging by what Fr. Jeffrey has said in his post, that's exactly the operative ecclesiology that he is fleeing. As I understand his journey, it had become apparent to him that there is such a thing as "the" Church and that the Anglican Communion, as an umbrella over conflicting views on fundamental points of doctrine, could not credibly claim to be a true, particular church within the larger communion of "the" Church. As as another Tiber-swimmer, Fr. Al Kimel, once wrote: "A church which does not claim to be the Church, outside of which there is no salvation, is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ." The Anglican Communion has, historically, understood itself to be at most a "branch" of the Church; but for Fr. Jeffrey and many others, the recent history of that communion calls even that claim into question. A church which recognizes no doctrinal authority other than a "consensus" identifiable by scholarship and subject to reversal by allegedly new things done by the Spirit cannot reliably transmit the "faith once given" to the saints—nor, indeed, eternal life. It cannot present divine revelation as anything more than a set of data about which various opinions can be entertained and should be tolerated. Such a church is not an authoritative vessel and teacher of truth, the Mystical Body of Christ which shares in his authority as her Head.

The Apostles understood Jesus to say: "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth" (Matthew 28:18). That authority came from the Father. Before he ascended back to the Father, Jesus gave a share in that authority to the Church (John 20:22) by breathing the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. That is why he could say to them and their successors: "Whoever hears you, hears me" (Luke 10:16). The Trinity is thus what gives the Church her auctoritas and her potestas. The life of the Trinity is what the Church exists to insert us into. As we celebrate bedrock reality as loving communion, let us celebrate all who, like Fr. Jeffrey, come to recognize and celebrate the Church as that Body through which we are invited to share that communion.

Gloria Patri, per Filium, in Spiritu Sancto!

The authority question restated

As promised, I have deleted my lengthy post of February 1, "Which contest is worth pissing in?". I did so in order to respect the privacy that my chief interlocutor felt he needed in order to conduct his theological discussion without scandal. That said, however, I want to improve the contribution I made to that discussion, and to encourage the continued involvement of readers who made contributions to the lengthy combox of the deleted post. (Any of those contributors who want a copy of that combox for reference purposes should email me for one. I've saved it in Word format.)

Over the decades, I have heard countless debates about ecclesial authority and contributed to not a few of them. For reasons I've described on this blog and elsewhere, such debates are unavoidable and, up to a point, healthy. Many people try to avoid them, of course. They deny that any entity called "the Church" has authority beyond appeal to preserve, present, and interpret divine revelation for us. They insist that Jesus Christ alone, who has been given "all authority in heaven and on earth" (Matthew 28:18), has the requisite authority and thus merits the requisite submission of mind and will. In a sense, that is true. But the debate is precisely about the extent to which something called "the Church," the Mystical Body of Christ which, together with the risen Christ, makes up "the whole Christ," has been granted such authority. I don't believe, and never have been able to believe, that we can dispense with the living voice of "the" Church—whichever communion of churches that may be—in ascertaining what God has revealed to us. In that belief, I am far from alone.

I hold said belief because, after many of the aforesaid debates, I became convinced that, if nobody on earth after the Apostles has the same degree of divine authority as theirs to say which propositions are and are not de fide, then the question where to draw the line between theological opinions about the data of revelation and divine revelation itself reduces, always and necessarily, to a matter of opinion. And that effectively renders the entire subject of divine "revelation" a matter of opinion, not of revelation. That is the reductio of denying divine teaching authority to some entity justly deemed "the Church." As Newman so pithily put it: “No revelation is given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.” Such an authority cannot of course decide on its own “what is given”; to serve its function, it can only do so with the subject matter and the authority Jesus Christ has given it. But if such authority has in fact been given it, then when it interprets Scripture and Tradition in a manner intended to bind the whole Church irreformably, the Holy Spirit guarantees that those interpretations will not be false.

That follows from the teaching of the Catholic Church, but it is not a distinctively Catholic position. The Orthodox churches too maintain that Scripture and Tradition can only be rightly received and interpreted in and through something called "the Church," that the authentic voice of the Church is the voice of Jesus Christ. The authentic voice of the Church is thus beyond appeal even if not "infallible" in the technical sense of that term employed by the two Vatican councils. Orthodoxy does differ from Catholicism about ecclesial authority, to be sure: it differs with Rome over the questions who in the Church teaches with the aforesaid voice and when. And those differences are significant enough to cause the Orthodox communion to regard itself, rather than the Roman communion, as "the" Church of Christ.

In point of fact, the centuries-old debates about ecclesial authority reveal not two but three distinct "hermeneutical circles" encompassing the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority. I shall describe those circles shortly. To characterize and understand them, however, we need to be limit who counts as participants in the debate.

It has become a sociological commonplace over the past few decades to note that the divisions between the three major strains of Christianity—Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy—are less important than the division between the more conservative and the more liberal believers within each of those strains. A conservative or a liberal believer within a given church generally has more in common with her counterparts in other churches than with people on the opposing wing in her own church. (Orthodoxy, of course, has a smaller percentage of "liberals" than Protestantism and Catholicism; but "liberals" there are, and I suspect there will be more in future.) I think the new commonplace is correct, and is best explained as the difference between people who believe that religious doctrine is ultimately a matter of provisional opinion—i.e., the liberals—and those who believe that divine revelation has given us identifiably absolute truths—i.e., the conservatives. It is the conservatives who count in the debate about ecclesial authority, because it is they who maintain that the revelation in and through Jesus Christ is public, complete, and definitive, in such a way that the deposit of faith left to us as the precipitate of revelation many neither be added to nor subtracted from. Accordingly, the three basic disagreements about the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial authority are disagreements among those who hold that the DF is both reliably identifiable as absolutely true and may neither be added to nor subtracted from. They are disagreements about precisely how the DF is to be handed on, received, and interpreted reliably, without augmentation or diminution, even as it was first left to us by a God "who can neither deceive nor be deceived."

As I've said, the disagreements take the form of three hermeneutical circles. The idea of a hermeneutical circle began, ironically enough, with the liberal Protestant theologian and biblical critic Friedrich Schliermacher; the term was formally introduced a century later by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who developed the idea further in parallel with another German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer. The core idea was that, in reading a text, the parts can only be understood with reference to the whole and the whole can only be understood with reference to the parts. That yields a circle. But an interpretive motif arising therefrom need not be viciously circular. For hermeneutical circles are unavoidable, and the way to decide between them—if and when we face such a decision—is to assess which of them is most capacious and plausible in light of what is known about the intentions of the author(s), the literary antecedents, and the historical context of the text. And even when such "knowledge" is too limited to settle the question, there's always the distinct possibility that such limits will be outgrown in the future.

For purposes of discussion, I cannot avoid oversimplifying the content of the three competing hermeneutical circles which, I believe, define the epistemic differences between the three main strains of Christianity. I am forced to omit all the variations and nuances of each and most of the supporting arguments for each. But each involves an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority; and I believe that, in the final analysis, the three circles may be described as follows with minimal unfairness:

• The Protestant HC. Scripture records the substance of apostolic Tradition, and the canon of Scripture was put together by ecclesial authorities over a rather long period of time. But once that process was complete, Scripture was recognized and accepted by all Christians as the sole written work of man which is inspired by the Holy Spirit. As such, Scripture is (a) materially sufficient as an expression of the DF, and (b) perspicuous enough in itself to enable any Spirit-led believer who reads it to reliably understand the parts in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the parts. Accordingly and (c), Scripture is the sole "infallible" rule of faith after the Apostles, and comprises all that is necessary for any Spirit-led believer to know, in its fullness, the verbally expressible content of what God has revealed to humanity in and through Jesus Christ.
  
  This HC is complete in principle. It enables believers, quite generally, to judge the orthodoxy of ecclesial authority in terms of Scripture. For given the material sufficiency and interpretive perspicuity of Scripture, any doctrine which is not explicitly stated in Scripture must be derivable therefrom by some form of rational necessity. The sole function of ecclesial authority is to bear and enforce faithful institutional witness to the Truth that can, in principle, be understood independently of such authority. Thus, such authority is not strictly necessary for assimilating divine revelation; it is only a disciplinary and educational convenience.
  
  
• The Orthodox HC. Scripture is indeed inspired by the Spirit and materially sufficient for expressing the DF. But Scripture is a work of the Church and for the Church, and can only be reliably understood as read by the Church in light of the broader "Holy Tradition" handed down to her from the Apostles. Tradition in that sense is the sum total of the ways in which the life of the Holy Spirit is manifest in the Church as a collectivity. Those ways chiefly include: the liturgy, the writings of the Fathers, the lives and wisdom of the saints, and the Ecumenical Councils. Although ecclesial teaching authority is ordinarily exercised by individual bishops over their flocks, only the dogmatic decress of the Ecumenical Councils must be understood as affirmations of faith which bind the whole Church.
  
  The doctrinal authority of such councils, however, is not primarily juridical. It lies in their "reception" by the whole Church over time as authentic expressions of the consensus of the faithful, informed as that consensus is by Scripture and Tradition understood together. From that point of view, "the Church" consists of those believers who accept such criteria as exhaustive touchstones of orthodoxy; hence the "Orthodox" communion. Such an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority constitutes an HC; for we know by the consensus of the Church which understandings of Scripture and Tradition are orthodox, and we know who is in the Church by their adherence to what is orthodox.
  
  But this is not a vicious circle. For to know the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who is a Person, entails belonging to his people, his Body, the Church; there is no standpoint outside her by which the true doctrine can be reliably known. At the same time, there is nothing in the historic consensus of the faithful to suggest that Jesus Christ willed that any one bishop or leader in the Church, apart from the consensus of the whole, exercise supreme doctrinal or disciplinary jurisdiction over the Church catholic. Orthodoxy is a gift of divine love, collectively received and collectively known. Though juridical authority is necessary in the Church, even for teaching, disputes about doctrine cannot be resolved by mere juridical imposition on the whole Church without her consent. Consensus, not diktat, is the true sign of what is Orthodox.

• The Catholic HC. First, read Dei Verbum §7-§10 and Lumen Gentium §25.
  
  Although Scripture and Tradition taken together are "materially sufficient" for expressing the entire DF, and can sometimes be understood to a great extent by various individuals without ecclesial authority, they can only be interpreted and understood "authentically"—i.e., with the authentic and thus binding voice of the Church—by the apostolic teaching authority or "Magisterium" of the Church. The "ordinary" way in which that is done is by the consensus of the bishops, which must be at least diachronic and is ideally synchronic too; "extraordinarily," it is done by the dogmatic decrees of ecumenical councils of the bishops and/or the dogmatic definitions of popes.
  
  For a putatively ecumenical council to bind the whole Church, it is necessary that its dogmatic decrees have at least the free consent if not the ratification of the Roman Pontiff, who succeeds Peter as the visible head of the episcopal college. Indeed he can, if he so chooses, speak unilaterally with the authentic voice of the Church, and when so doing enjoys "the infallibility with which Christ willed His Church to be endowed in teaching on faith or morals." Such definitions do not therefore acquire their binding character from the "consent of the Church" (cf. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus); yet in such cases "the assent of the Church can never be wanting, on account of the activity of that same Holy Spirit, by which the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of faith" (LG §25).
  
  Such an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority constitutes an HC. On the one hand, it is clear that Scripture and Tradition, which together form "one sacred deposit of the Word of God," were not formed and cannot be authentically understood without the Magisterium (DV §10). On the other hand, the Magisterium has no authority other than that which Scripture and Tradition record as having been given by Jesus Christ to the Apostles and their successors, the college of bishops united with their head, the Bishop of Rome. Indeed the Magisterium, whether episcopal in general or papal in particular, would make no sense and could not function without a general understanding and possession of the DF in the Church as a whole. But without sitting, knowingly or unknowingly, on the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, one cannot know what is orthodox by reference to Scripture and Tradition without the Magisterium. The ambit of orthodoxy, including the authentic development of doctrine, is definable only by the Magisterium in its definitive and binding interpretations of that unified "Word of God" known as Scripture-and-Tradition. But whenever the Magisterium does issue such definitive and binding interpretations of the DF, it must do so in a manner that logically consistent with its prior interpretations that enjoy the same degree of authority. It is of course logically possible for the Magisterium to fail to do so; but it is not spiritually possible, given that the three-legged stool is God's means of ensuring the Church's unfailing profession of the "faith once given to the saints" (Jude 3).

The first point to be made about the above three "hermeneutical circles" is that none can be shown superior to the others with an argument containing only premises that all parties involved—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic—would accept. From within each circle, the others will seem at best question-begging and, at worst, viciously circular. To borrow a metaphor from the philosophy of science: each HC constitutes a paradigm that is epistemically incommensurable with the others. And that holds even when many quite similar doctrinal conclusions are reached from within each HC.

For example, for the last quarter of 2008, I actively participated in a series of Bible studies led by a team of conservative, evangelically-oriented Protestant ministers. Throughout the series, I heard not a single doctrinal assertion that was incompatible with Catholicism. Although the leaders did not recognize the Catholic Magisterium's claims to authority, their interpretations of the DF on the doctrinally significant points that came up were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Catholic Church. Similarly, as a college student in the 1970s, I attended many Orthodox talks and liturgies; once again, I heard not a single doctrinally significant assertion that I could find, after due inquiries, to be logically incompatible with Catholicism. Both the Protestants recently and the Orthodox back then turned out to be professing the same doctrines I did on the points being discussed, even though their language and conceptual framework were often quite different from what I was used to. The disagreements with me as a Catholic only came up when I asked them to give their reasons for interpreting the sources as they did. More generally, it seems to me that the differences defined by the three HCs are less over what we know of the DF than over how we know it.

But that source of Christian disunity, I submit, is not merely a philosophical problem. It is not just a matter of epistemological differences that could eventually be overcome by scholarly means such as clever argument, creative re-reading, and further research. No discoveries of lost texts or artifacts, no renewed critical editing of known texts, no work of theological genius, would even begin to break open and join into one the three HCs that define the basic epistemological differences between the three main strains of Christianity. By the same token, no arguments from reason alone are objectively cogent enough to rationally compel any informed but uncommitted inquirer to decide that one particular HC is better than the others. Each such inquirer should in due course decide, on the basis of the sort of information I've described above, which HC is the most plausible to him; and ordinarily, that suffices to justify a decision in good conscience to embrace one of them as a matter of faith. But given that each HC presents its understanding of doctrinal authority as an element of the DF, and therefore as a matter of faith, no such decision can be shown to be the only rationally justifiable one. For if any one HC were the only rationally justifiable one, then its understanding of doctrinal authority would be a conclusion of human reason rather than a tenet of divine faith.

I shall not repeat here my reasons for having chosen the Catholic HC. I've explained all that before and, if only as a means of defending my faith, will doubtless find myself doing so again. The point I want to close with is one that ought to be granted by any participant in the intra-Christian debates over ecclesial authority: if such debates could be resolved by scholarly considerations alone, they would already have been resolved. I am tempted to say they would never have arisen in the first place.

The case of Brother Roger

Long ago, St. Augustine remarked: “There are some whom God has, whom the Church has not. And there are some whom the Church has, whom God has not…When we speak of within and without in relation to the Church, it is the position of the heart that we must consider, not that of the body . . . All who are within the heart are saved in the unity of the ark” (On Baptism 5). For reasons doubtless known more to the Holy Spirit than to me, I've been thinking a lot lately about that anomaly in the economy of salvation. It just is true that some non-Catholics are in fuller communion with the Catholic Church than some Catholics. That fact calls for theological explanation which not everybody can appreciate—and that fact in turn that is troubling enough, at least to me. But my friend Dr. Phil Blosser has brought to my attention a particular ecclesiological anomaly whose official explanation is even more troubling than the anomaly itself.

Calvinist pastor Roger Schutz, the de facto leader of Taizé who was murdered in 2005 by a deranged woman at a public ecumenical service, had previously been given the Eucharist by then-Cardinal Ratzinger and by Cardinal Kasper, who now serves as President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. At long last, Kasper has explained that anomaly. Here's the gist of the explanation:

He denies that Fr. Schutz "formally" adhered to the Catholic Church. And much less did he abandon the Protestantism into which he was born. He affirms, instead, that he gradually "enriched" his faith with the pillars of the Catholic faith, particularly the role of Mary in salvation history, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the "the ministry of unity exercised by the bishop of Rome." In response to this, the Catholic Church allowed him to receive Eucharistic communion. According to Kasper, it is as if there had been an unwritten agreement between Schutz and the Church of Rome, "crossing certain confessional" and canonical limits.

That greatly puzzles me, Phil, and other orthodox Catholics who know and care about such things. If Brother Roger, without evincing any intention of becoming formally Catholic, could receive the Eucharist, then why not traditional Anglican clergy? Why not anybody who believes certain distinctively Catholic doctrines but who, for whatever reason, sees fit to remain formally non-Catholic? What happens to the RCIA? In what sense, beyond the merely empirical, does it remain a norm to reserve the Eucharist for those who are in full communion with the Church?

Since I often disagree with Cardinal Kasper, and certainly don't find him as good a theologian as the countryman of his who occupies the Chair of Peter, I'm not really interested in hearing his answers to such questions. I'm interested in hearing the Pope's. As Ratzinger he was, after all, directly implicated in the case of Brother Roger. Will we hear from the Pope about this? I don't know. Perhaps the answers are already latent in the Church's norms, and I just haven't thought hard enough to make them patent. But right now I can't think quite hard enough to manage that.

Can anybody offer something that isn't just a way of restating the problem?

Communion by degree

Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is anti-men's-rights, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, John Allen has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.

Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.

One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.

Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.

It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus: "outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (LG §13).

Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect (UR §3).

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG §16).

The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, not culpable for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church's explanation of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in "imperfect" communion with the Church. Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.

That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.

It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of Pontifications, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay Development and Negation. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation outside the Church; it's another to say what being inside the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree. That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.

What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how non-Catholics can be in some degree of communion with the Church, but how Catholics themselves can fail to in full communion—and why that matters.

The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, rightly and in considerable detail, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. 1 Cor 11: 23-30). If they are thus and culpably not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.

Now even Catholics who only formally cooperate with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are guilty of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.

On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is objectively culpable for not being in full communion with the Church, the appearance of full communion on their part is generally kept up.

Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place. And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.

It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better and the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some especially trenchant things to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.

But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.

Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced a bracing document which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.

Of what use is "the Vincentian Canon"?

Let me say at the outset that I believe there is an important use for the Vincentian Canon. I did not always believe that. I believe it now because, as we shall see toward the end of this post, the Pope does, and I greatly respect his intellect as well as his office. But I don't think that will satisfy my critics. Of that, I should probably be glad. But what's the use of the thing?

On this blog, I have more than once criticized the rather frequent citation of the Vincentian Canon against the Catholic Church, even though the canon itself speaks of "the Catholic Church" as that church whose faith the VC was intended to help identify and clarify. Progressive Catholics, traditional Anglicans, and most Orthodox—i.e. people who, for different reasons, reject the idea that the Roman communion just is the Catholic Church—are wont to task Rome for requiring more of believers than some common doctrinal core that is alleged to have been "held always, everywhere, and by all." And the VC is said to forbid, with great authority, requiring any more of believers than that. Now, my most recent defense of Rome on this subject was occasioned by a critique made by Continuing-Anglican priests Robert Hart and Matthew Kirby, who hold forth at The Continuum. And I answered Fr. Kirby's criticism of my argument by pointing out that the allegedly Roman "doctrine of manifest unity," which he claims fails to meet even Rome's critieria for having been definitively taught, is not in fact the doctrine Rome teaches. Yet as Fr. Al Kimel has pointed out, I neglected to also directly rebut Fr. Kirby's criticism of my remarks about the use of the VC itself. Since I consider this issue very important, I shall now remedy my neglect.

Rather than simply re-quote my argument, which was originally made to a different person in a different context, I shall sum up my position here for greater clarity.

The following from St. Vincent of Lerins (ca. 434 CE), which includes both the VC and an explication of its use, is true:

Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly 'Catholic,' as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality [i.e. oecumenicity], antiquity, and consent. We shall follow universality if we acknowledge that one Faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is clear that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed; consent, if in antiquity itself we keep following the definitions and opinions of all, or certainly nearly all, bishops and doctors alike.

But the VC is not literally true. It is not literally true that every tenet taught by the Catholic Church has been believed "everywhere, always, and by all," even restricting the universal quantifier "all" to formal members of the Catholic Church. For there have always been heresies aplenty among those who are, or at least started out as, formally members of the Catholic Church. But given that the VC is true all the same, there must be rules of application for the VC which, if followed, exhibit the sense in which the VC is true. St. Vincent indeed states several of them. Yet my main point is that one such rule is implied by St. Vincent's words and must be this: the doctrinally true referent of the term 'the Catholic Church' must always be understood and followed in order for the VC itself to be truly understood and reliably applied.

That is the point which Fr. Kirby criticizes as follows:

...Dr Liccione’s rendering of the Vincentian Canon is in danger of being reduced to a useless tautology, and one that Catholics could not accept inasmuch as it would imply all past appeal to this principle was an invalid circular argument. That is, if it is true one cannot appeal to the Vincentian Canon to judge a controversial doctrinal issue without first successfully determining exactly who or what churches are definitely orthodox and Catholic (so that their consent counts), then one must determine who is on the “right side” of any disputed matter before one can use consensus to determine which is the right side! That really would be incoherent.Indeed, the numbered argument I have given above as, I think, an accurate summary of our friend’s position does not use the Vincentian Canon in consistency with this tautological interpretation. Instead, it attempts to show that, even without knowing a priori who is the OTC, one can use the principle of St Vincent of Lerins to conclusively reject Anglo-Catholicism. Hence, any polemical attempt to deny the right of Anglican Catholics to appeal to the Canon in support of their teaching and identity, such as Manning’s infamous reference to the treachery of an appeal to history or his glorying in the triumph of dogma over history, is unreasonable.

As I understand him, Fr. Kirby is making two criticisms: (1) If I really stuck to my main point, my position would be incoherent; (2) Given why I don't stick to my main point, Continuing Anglicans are free to cite the VC to justify their ecclesiology, which it was my purpose to reject.

Perhaps the best way for me to begin answering Fr. Kirby is to explain just why I have maintained the point he criticizes. My first and lesser reason is that to reject or ignore it is to downplay the context in which, and the purpose for which, St. Vincent wrote. He was writing primarily for a literate minority of Catholics at a time when the Western Empire was disintegrating and the Church, in the East as well as the West, was rife with heresies. St. Augustine, for example, had died in 430 while still fighting, among other evils, Donatism and Pelagianism. In 431, the third "ecumenical council" (at Ephesus), amid street riots and bitter episcopal machinations, anathematized Nestorius and thus caused a schism that has lasted down to this day. We do not know whether St. Vincent, a Western father, knew about that council when he wrote. But his purpose in that tumultuous time was clear: to give thinking Catholics a reliable criterion for determining whether a given controversial doctrine expressed the faith of the Catholic Church (his term, mind you) or not. To insist that one need not know what the term 'the Catholic Church' antecedently refers to in order to apply the VC reliably for such a purpose is to make an argument that St. Vincent did not make and, I would venture to say, would not have accepted. Why that's so is the second and major reason for my position.

Consider how St. Vincent himself goes on to recommend applying his "canon":

What then will the Catholic Christian do, if a small part of the Church has cut itself off from the communion of the universal Faith? The answer is sure. He will prefer the healthiness of the whole body to the morbid and corrupt limb. But what if some novel contagion try to infect the whole Church, and not merely a tiny part of it? Then he will take care to cleave to antiquity, which cannot now be led astray by any deceit of novelty. What if in antiquity itself two or three men, or it may be a city, or even a whole province be detected in error? Then he will take the greatest care to prefer the decrees of the ancient General Councils, if there are such, to the irresponsible ignorance of a few men. But what if some error arises regarding which nothing of this sort is to be found? Then he must do his best to compare the opinions of the Fathers and inquire their meaning, provided always that, though they belonged to diverse times and places, they yet continued in the faith and communion of the one Catholic Church; and let them be teachers approved and outstanding. And whatever he shall find to have been held, approved and taught, not by one or two only but by all equally and with one consent, openly, frequently, and persistently, let him take this as to be held by him without the slightest hesitation.

The methodology St. Vincent recommends in the above paragraph could not even get off the ground if the person applying it did not already know what the term 'the Church'—i.e. the Catholic Church—concretely and specifically refers to. That emerges even more clearly when we attend to what St. Vincent does with the phrase 'the ancient General Councils'.

Which councils did he mean? Surely not the well-attended Council of Antioch in 268, which among other things considered how to speak of the divinity of the Son in relation to the Father. That council sharply rejected using the term homoousios, "of the same substance," to describe that relation; yet fifty-seven years later, the council which is universally deemed the first "ecumenical" council, at Nicaea, adopted that very term to combat the Arian heresy that had arisen less than two generations after the Antiochene council. Even so, by the time St. Vincent wrote his canon, the Arian heresy was still very much alive, despite the efforts of the only other "ecumenical" council to be held before St. Vincent came of age: that of Constantinople in 381, a purely Eastern council which had not yet been acknowledged by Rome as universally binding by the time St. Vincent wrote. So, what does St. Vincent think the authority of "general councils" consists in?

He simply could not have meant that their authority derived from any unbiased student's being able to see, on the basis of other criteria, the conformity of their creeds with what had "been held always, everywhere, and by all." Why not? Because he was recommending that we consult general councils precisely in order to determine what had thus been held, and precisely at a time when some orthodox but controverted doctrines were by no means held "everywhere and by all." On St. Vincent's methodology, then, the authority of "general councils" to determine which statements were "orthodox,"—i.e. which statements truly expressed the faith of the Church—could not, either logically or historically, have derived simply from some clear and general recognition that the statements approved by such councils expressed what had been "held always, everywhere, and by all." It's rather the other way round: the dogmatic decrees of general councils are what enable Catholics to recognize what had been "held always, everywhere, and by all" to begin with.

Given as much, St. Vincent was appealing to the authority of such councils to speak for the Catholic Church as a whole and thus define the faith of the Church as a whole. That authority is not, to be sure, entirely independent of the deposit of faith it claims to hand on definitively, nor did St. Vincent believe it to be thus independent. He knew that the teaching authority of the Church is not above the Word of God but only serves it. By the same token, however, the authority of general councils as convocations of bishops speaking for the Church as a whole had already been, by St. Vincent's time, long acknowledged to be that of the successors of the Apostles. The teaching authority of the Apostles was abundantly clear in the New Testament, and was long understood by Tradition to have been passed down to validly ordained bishops. The authority of the Magisterium to interpret the deposit of faith in an authentic, binding, and definitive manner was already, itself, understood to belong to the deposit of faith. But such authority would be nugatory if its exercise stood under judgment by people who simply decided for themselves whether or not the dogmatic decrees of a given general council conformed to what had been "held always, everywhere, and by all."

This of course immediately raises the question how, for St. Vincent, an authoritative "general council" is to recognized as such. Is it just the sheer number of bishops attending it and approving its decrees? Not exactly: the Council of Rimini (359), called to once again address the Arian controversy that Nicaea had fail to quell 33 years earlier, had more bishops in attendance than Nicaea and ended up approving an Arian creed! That result was what caused St. Jerome to observe: "The whole world groaned in astonishment to find itself Arian." Presumably St. Vincent, who accepted Nicaea, rejected Rimini too. Well then, how are we to know that one big council is to be accepted as authoritative and another not? St. Vincent is silent on that question, although I doubt it is coincidental that Pope Liberius was known to have annulled the decrees of Rimini a few years after it adjourned. Neither do I think it coincidental that Pope St. Leo the Great taught, less than thirty years after the writing we have from St. Vincent, an understanding of the papacy that can only be described as "Vatican I in nuce" (to borrow a phrase from Fr. Kimel). Regardless of the criteria by which we distinguish truly ecumenical councils from latrocinia, however, my point about the role of the former in using the VC stands.

How about when there is no "general council" to settle a question? St. Vincent answers by recommending, in effect, that we diligently seek a consensus patrum. But such a consensus is not to be sought among just any old writers claiming to be Christian; it is to be sought only among "teachers approved and outstanding." Approved by whom? Well, who else than the authorities of the Catholic Church? Outstanding among whom? Among those Catholics who are not Catholics in name only, but who humbly submit their judgments to the Magisterium and those writers whom the holders of the Magisterium recommend. When a consensus is to be found among such approved and outstanding writers on a matter pertaining to the deposit of faith, then we can identify and embrace the faith of the Church as such in their consensus.

An example of how the Magisterium itself employs the VC illustrates what that involves. Consider then-Cardinal Ratzinger's CDF responsum ad dubium on Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, a document of John Paul II's which had ruled that the Church's lack of authority to ordain women priests was a doctrine to be "definitively held by all the faithful."

This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of the faith.

Notice how Ratzinger ended: OS's teaching is to be "held always, everywhere, and by all." That is a clear allusion to the VC, and it is a fair allusion because it had already been said that OS's teaching was "from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church." Knowing that the VC is not literally true as a description, in this or in most other cases, Ratzinger transforms it into a prescription. But it is a prescription founded in large part on the methodologies St. Vincent himself recommends. I am thus led to believe that the VC is useful not as a empirical method of polling the Christians of the past, still less of the present, than as a normative method of ascertaining the faith of the Catholic Church by synthesizing the statements of her duly constituted authorities and those they approve. Such a normative method is highly useful for those willing to accept it. But it would not make sense without the visible, historical Catholic Church, and her teaching authority, taken as givens.

Hence, pace Fr. Kirby, my position is not "incoherent." The way one knows who has the authority to settle controversial doctrinal issues is not, as Fr. Kirby says I say, to first "determine who is on the right side." That would be Protestantism, and I am not a Protestant because I don't believe that such a stance, if generalized, is compatible with the gift of faith. The way one knows who has the authority to settle doctrinal controversies is simply to locate the Catholic Church, which is where the the authority to determine what the right side is abides. Nor do I abandon that position for the sake of using the VC to reject Anglo-Catholicism, while prescinding from the question which ecclesial communion is "the" Church. I believe it is inherently implausible—VC or no VC, Catholic Church or no Catholic Church—to claim to know who and where "the Church" is while rejecting the ecclesiological self-understanding of each of the communions one claims to be branches of the Church. And I believe St. Vincent would support me in that, if he were still concerned with ecclesiological polemics.