Page 8 - The Priest, Summer 2015

extremely pastoral duty, a duty by which priests enlighten the people by teaching the truth. Like wise doctors and merciful Samaritans, they heal the people from the wounds of untruth. The priest, and espe- cially the bishop, as an instrument of the truth must pour upon the wounds of men, who have fallen among the robbers of the present age (i.e., among the spirits of un- truth), rst of all, the disinfecting, and thus often painful, wine of truth as well as the oil of consolation and patient instruc- tion. Pope Saint Gregory the Great speaks about this in his Regula Pastoralis:
“You should have love, but not unto ar- bitrariness and over-softness; goodness should not be such that it harms the guilty. Church leaders should have the courage, by means of zeal for justice, to rise up against the vice of evil-doers and by means of humility to be a companion of the just: “bene agentibus per humili- tatem socius.”3
The need for a new syllabus
Those responsible for the health of the body today show extraordinary zeal in keeping human diseases and epidem- ics away. They issue continuous warnings about the spreading of diseases; detailed lists are published in which the diseases, their causes and their effects are described in great detail. This is a kind of medicinal syllabus. No right-thinking man would get the idea to call such a medicinal syllabus intolerance, limitation of freedom, or a step backwards. On the contrary, it is seen as a great bene t for the people.
There was hardly any age in the history of the Church, characterized by so much doctrinal confusion and relativism of the truth as the twentieth century, most es- pecially from 50 years ago to the present. And this confusion seems only to grow. Such a situation nds analogy only in the Arian crisis of the fourth century. The ab- soluteness and the unchangeableness of the truth is today often doubted and de- nied, as, for instance, in the case of all the following truths:
• salvation through Christ alone – which means through his Church – for all men, including the Jews;
• the identity of the Catholic Church with the one and only Church of Christ;
• the objective and intrinsic evil of con- traception and homosexual acts and ways of life;
• the complete, bodily, perpetual virgin- ity of Mary, including at the birth of Christ;
• the primary and essential sacri cial character of the Mass;
• Eucharistic transubstantiation and the real presence of Christ even in the smallest particle of the consecrated Host;
• the eternity of hell, the eternal con- demnation of the fallen angels and the real possibility of the same condemna- tion for those who die without contri- tion in the state of mortal sin;
• the monarchical constitution of the Church given by Christ himself and the leadership of the pope, his vicar, the Peter of today, over the entire Church.
The denial of these truths and their deformation takes effect on people’s mind and soul similar to the way a serious dis- ease affects the body. Their effect is fur- thermore contagious. People have more concern today about the health of the mortal body than the health of the im- mortal soul. All the errors dangerous for souls that we have enumerated are wide- spread and contagious. Is not the issuing and publishing of a dogmatic syllabus, i.e., of a detailed warning about these diseases for souls both pro table and urgently nec- essary?
Conclusion
There have been crises in the Church where the Holy Spirit preferably used members of the common priesthood, i.e., lay people, to overcome the crises. During the long Avignon captivity of the Church, for instance, the contribution from men and women from among the faithful peo- ple was decisive for overcoming the crisis.
Among the best known were St Catherine of Siena, St Bridget of Sweden, and the German emperor Sigmund.
God loves to accomplish his great deeds through that which is little. And so it happened on 11 November 1417, the formal end of the Avignon exile, by means of a new papal election. The decisive fac- tor of the event was a group of innocent children. While the cardinals persisted many days in disagreement and helpless- ness and no solution was in view, a boys’ choir processed below the window of the room where they were gathered. The boys sang the Veni Creator in a clear voice. When the cardinals heard it, they were moved to tears and immediately elected a new Ro- man pontiff, whereby the 70 year crisis of the Church was of cially over.
We might make a well-founded claim, that the Church of our times is in a type of liturgical and doctrinal Avignon exile. The world and souls need a doctrinal sylla- bus in view of effectively combating these diseases together with a corresponding process of convalescence. Maybe the issu- ing of such a syllabus today should begin rst of all by the simple members of the Mystical Body. Well-formed lay people, priests and individual bishops, conscious of their responsibility for the Faith of the Church could surely issue an informal Syl- labus errorum. As time passes, such voices of the simple will become an unwavering chorus of faith among the confusion of the present Church crisis. We hope that also today, the Holy Spirit will use the lit- tle and pure of the Church to move the great and mighty in the Church to decisive action for her true renewal. Such action would be, without a doubt, the publication of a papal Syllabus errorum together with a convincing, clear and loving clari cation of divine truth and the restoration of a more unequivocal sacredness of the litur- gy, in the spirit of uninterrupted liturgical tradition.
To show the world and souls the way to heaven: that is the most proper and most beautiful task of every priest and of the whole Church. For Christ, the Life and the Truth, is the ideal and the strength, but the priest is nevertheless his living image and instrument (imago et instrumentum). Ä
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• the indissolubility and sacramentality of marriage;
St Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis (II, 6). 8 – Summer 2015
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