Skip to main content

The Enlightenment: Behind the Dictatorship of Relativism

In his Smoke of Satan" homily, Paul VI warned that those who do not think with the mind of the Church may be exposed to “the influence of ‘the mystery of iniquity” in evidence when “the spirit of the Gospel is watered down or rejected…” The reason behind this disregard of the authority of the documents of divine revelation was the neomodernists'’ assimilation of the principles of modernity. Fr. Jonathan Robinson has shown how various Enlightenment themes have played a role in the formation of the modern consciousness as it has impinged most directly on the Church. To cite one example of this, Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar criticized the Enlightenment’s understanding of religion in an analysis of its influence on Karl. Rahner’s anthropocentric theology:

The Enlightenment was the change from a theocentric to an anthropocentric viewpoint; for religion . . . this means the change from a positive historical religion to a religion valid for man in general, who is essentially religious. . . . Everywhere in the world and in history, God's self-communication takes place in the Holy Spirit offered to every human being, a self-communication which itself already possesses as such the character of a revelation of truth and which finds in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, only its full historical tangibility. Positive dogmas, based on history, are transcendentally outlined in human nature. . . . The better the Enlightenment understands its own program, the less it will seek this absolute in contingent historical facts rather than in the inner enforcement of truth in the subject. This also applies to the Church, which wants to make the transposition of Christian faith into today's modes of understanding her business. As a necessary consequence, there must ensue a shift of accent from the objective dignity of truth in itself to recognition of and respect for the dignity of the subjective awareness of truth.

At the time, Cardinal Ratzinger had written that the best measure of theological speculation is its spiritual consequences; given his position as the most influential speculative theologian after Vatican II, Rahner’s capitulation to Enlightenment religious thinking has proven poisonous to the both Christian gospel and the Liturgy

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with  Fox News Digital.  "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years.  Listen to her testimony.    

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D:   This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

The Dysfunctional Nations

From time to time a local pastor fires us up with fortitudinal e-blasts, of which this is his latest: Dear Parishioners, Every Catholic should be angry about this. Please take the time to read the editorial below that recently appeared in  Investor's Business Daily . Cheers in the Lord,  Fr. Tony United Nations Scolds Catholic Church On Human Rights             Anti-Religion:  Ignoring abhorrences such as China's one-child policy and atrocities condoned by Shariah law, a U.N. committee tells the Vatican to deal with abusive priests and change its teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. That the report issued by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child would mention the instances of abuse of children by priests in the United States is not surprising.  What is surprising and unfortunate is that the U.N. would act as if the Catholic Church had done nothing about it and use the report as a ...

On the Universalist Heresy

  Universalism is the speculation that we can know with certainty that every single human being or possibly every creature, including the devil himself, will be saved, and was condemned in 543 by the Church. It dates from the time of Origen in the third century, with his defense of what he called “Apocatastasis,” the notion that all things will be all in God—everyone shall be saved. I dare say it is a belief well-established among Catholics today, supported   by some Catholic theologians predisposed to this view.   Universalism stems from doctrine of hell, the idea that people might be separated from God for all eternity and endure eternal conscious torment because of this alienation. Universalist theologians, following Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar say that Universalism represents the triumph of hope over biblical evidence. Yet t he Church has taught from the beginning that both heaven and hell exist, and there are two possibilities for each of us: eternit...

Cardinal Sarah’s warning of “demonic” “apocalyptic beasts” of “the idolatry of Western freedom” verified in Argentina

There is indeed a great battle being played out in that three-week meeting that is rightfully being followed and reported on by all the world’s media. Society is reaching a climax in the war against the family.  In the above video,  hordes of women, many of them masked and half naked, violently assaulted a group of young men who stood outside the Cathedral of Mar de Plata, praying. One Peter Five has written: Over the past three weeks, Catholic Church leaders from around the world have gathered for the Ordinary Synod of the Family in Rome, the second in a two-part session that began in October 2014. The meeting was a perfect opportunity for bishops to discuss how to strengthen the family in the midst of serious challenges — issues such as contraception, abortion and chastity in a sexually licentious culture. Instead, it has become mired in debates over long-settled teaching on sexual mores, with agendas advanced by progressive and controversial...

Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON   NOVEMBER 22, 2020   BY   JOHN HINDERAKER  IN  DEMOCRATS ,  LIBERALS ,  SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X.  In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

A Book for all Seasons

  Decades as a Christian leader — most notably at the U.N. as president of the Center for Family & Human Rights — have earned writer Austin Ruse, once a Washington liberal with little faith, his share of defeats and triumphs. Perhaps most valuably, he has intuited keen tactical insights from his confrontations with the dark side of human nature. You come away from this groundbreaking book with the sense that Ruse knows the enemy better than the enemy knows himself.  In Under Seige, Ruse carefully examines how the anti-Christian forces gained power over every elite institution in America. He exposes their most deviant plans for the future. He then issues his authoritative call to arms, brilliantly arguing that there is no finer time to be a faithful Catholic. God Himself called each of us to live in this time and place, to contribute to the renewal society and the Church, and to vanquish the enemies of civilization. Ruse argues that each of us is called specifically to th...

Why did God Make You?

Often we get caught up in the things of this world to the extent that, as Catholics, we forget why God made us, and what our existence means, really. So, find 45 minutes, and enjoy!

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s   Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation.  Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...