-from The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God:
….In effect, a “rival magisterium” of theologians and religious education experts had arisen, taking upon itself the authority to say what Catholic teaching was and was not after Vatican II. Paul VI noted this, alarmed at the apostasy of these neomodemists in not believing the fullness of Catholic teaching handed down from the Apostles and interpreted for the faithful by the Vicar of Christ in union with the successors of the Apostles. The Pope’s alarm was evident in his call for the Church to observe a “year of faith” in honor of Sts. Peter and Paul:
….In effect, a “rival magisterium” of theologians and religious education experts had arisen, taking upon itself the authority to say what Catholic teaching was and was not after Vatican II. Paul VI noted this, alarmed at the apostasy of these neomodemists in not believing the fullness of Catholic teaching handed down from the Apostles and interpreted for the faithful by the Vicar of Christ in union with the successors of the Apostles. The Pope’s alarm was evident in his call for the Church to observe a “year of faith” in honor of Sts. Peter and Paul:
We wish to address a special exhortation to those engaged in the study
of Sacred Scripture and theology, to collaborate with the hierarchical teaching
authority of the Church in defending the true faith from all error and in
sounding its unfathomable depths, in correctly expounding its content and in
drawing up reasoned norms for its study and spread. This same appeal we make to
preachers, to teachers of religion and to catechists.
And while man’s religious sense today is in a decline, depriving the
faith of its natural foundation, new opinions in exegesis and theology often
borrowed from bold but blind secular philosophies have in places found a way
into the realm of Catholic teaching. They question or distort the objective
sense of truths taught with authority by the Church; under the pretext of
adapting religious thought to the contemporary outlook they prescind from the
guidance of the Church’s teaching, give the foundations of theological speculation
a direction of historicism, dare to rob Holy
Scripture’s testimony of its sacred and historical character and try
to introduce a so-called “post-conciliar” mentality among lie People of God;
this neglects the solidity and consistency of the Council’s vast and
magnificent developments of teaching and legislation, neglects with it the
Church’s accumulated riches of thought and practice in order to overturn the
spirit of traditional fidelity and spread about the illusion of giving
Christianity a new interpretation, which is arbitrary and barren. What would
remain of the content of our faith, or of the theological virtue that professes
it, if these attempts, freed from the support of the Church’s teaching
authority, were destined to prevail?
Paul
VI furthered his crusade against this threat from within the Church Jesus built
upon Peter in his Credo of the People of God. The genius of the Credo
was in its twofold purpose of “confirming the brethren against the errors
in the Dutch Catechism which had brought about widespread doubt and
uncertainty, and doing so by a positive expanded restatement of the traditional
creedal outline derived from the Nicene Creed.
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