The True Spirit of the Church
by Fr. David M. Knight
August 3, 2024
Seventeenth Week of the Year Saturday
Lectionary 406
Jer 26:11-16, 24/Mt 14:1-12
In Jeremiah 26:11-24 the prophet is defended by the “laity,” who discerned the voice of God better than the authorities: “The princes and all the people said to the priests and the prophets, ‘This man does not deserve death; it is in the name of the LORD, our God, that he speaks to us.’” For a doctrinal perspective on this we turn to Bl. Cardinal Newman, who suffered for his 1859 article On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. (Newman, born 1801, was ordained an Anglican priest in 1825. He converted to Catholicism in 1845, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1846, and made a Cardinal in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII (but insisted on not being a bishop). He died in 1890, and was beatified by Benedict XVI on September 19, 2010. What follows is from Michael Sharkey, op cit, Monday, Week Eleven, above.)
This was “an act of political suicide from which his career within the Church was never fully to recover.” He wrote truth that was unwelcome to the hierarchy:
The tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church, manifests itself... by the mouth of the episcopacy, the doctors, the people; by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs; by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of those channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect: granting at the same time fully, that the gift of... defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens [teaching Church].
At the time of the Arian heresy:
The dogma of our Lord's divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained, and... preserved, far more by the Ecclesia docta [taught Church] than by the Ecclesia docens. The body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism...
Newman shows that the Nicene dogma was maintained, “not by the unswerving firmness of the Holy See, Councils, or bishops, but by the consensus fidelium” [agreement of the laity].
Clericalism was “one of the chief evils” he confronted in founding the Catholic University of Ireland. He describes it as:
the resolute refusal with which my urgent representations ever met that the Catholic laity should be allowed to cooperate with the archbishops in the work. As far as I can see, there are ecclesiastics all over Europe whose policy is to keep the laity at arm's length. Hence the laity have been disgusted and become infidel, and only two parties exist, both ultras in opposite directions.
Remnants of the same refusal today are bearing the same divisive results. All who minister must surrender as Jesus did to the Father: “Not what I want but what you want. Thy will be done!”
Matthew 14:1-12: Herod uses power to keep John from speaking truth. All authorities face this temptation. Some, like Herod, are restrained only by fear of public response, In the Church this depends on an active laity.
Initiative: Take responsibility for preserving the true spirit of the Church.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
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