What do we mean when we profess in the Creed that the Church is holy? In the teaching of saints and teachers like Bernard of Clairvaux, the conviction that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic stands side by side with cries for reform, a willingness to challenge the sins and other failures of… Read More The Holiness of the Church
In light of our recent discussion of reform in the history of the Church, I wanted to bring to your attention a panel featuring John O’Malley, Russell Hittinger, and Joseph Mueller. The panel addresses losses and gains in the governance of the Church after Vatican I. There are some important references in the dialogue back to… Read More Vatican I and Papal Governance
In the previous post, we saw Bernard of Clairvaux’s way of confronting the spiritual and moral failures of those seeking and holding clerical offices. In On Consideration to Pope Eugenius, his aim is the reform of the papacy. Writing between 1148-53, Bernard sets forth what Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan call a “mirror” of the papal office.… Read More Cries for Reform in the Tradition – Bernard of Clairvaux (and Pope Eugenius III)
by Matthew Gaetano Recent events–political and especially ecclesiastical–have made discussions of fourteenth-century political theology, seventeenth-century Augustinianism, nineteenth-century Romanticism, etc., seem less than timely or appropriate. In light of this situation, I thought that it might be fruitful to see how saints, theologians, and clergymen in the past articulated their cries for reform. A friend recently… Read More Cries for Reform in the Tradition – Bernard of Clairvaux
by Matthew Gaetano Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), one of the most important early German Romantics, deserves more attention from theologians today. I think that one of the reasons for the problematic shape of “modernity criticism” today is that we at times forget about the critics of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and others between the seventeenth and twentieth… Read More Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and Catholic Traditionalism
by Matthew Gaetano Article 5 of the Colloquy of Regensburg–its statement on justification–is a famous moment in the history of dialogue between Roman Catholics and Protestants. A while ago, we published a rough translation of the agreement on original sin. I’ve provided here a translation of Articles 1 through 3 on the state of innocence,… Read More Articles 1-3 of the Colloquy of Regensburg
by Matthew Gaetano In a previous post, I discussed Henri de Lubac’s criticism of the position of Bellarmine and Suarez on the pope’s power to depose Christian kings. Though he believed that such a position was already obsolete in the context of his own day, he called this position–quite widespread from the Middle Ages through… Read More John of Paris, the Deposing Power, and the Punishment of Heretics
by Matthew Gaetano In my previous post, I discussed theologians who offered interpretations of the doctrine of the two swords before the Second Vatican Council. While some hierocrats believed that the pope’s two swords made him lord of the world, Vitoria, Bellarmine, and Suarez argued that popes had indirect power in temporal matters. Papal power… Read More Henri de Lubac’s Criticism of Indirect Power
by Matthew Gaetano In the excellent dialogue hosted at the Regensburg Forum several months ago about Vatican II, religious freedom, and political theology, Boniface VIII seems (quite understandably) to have been in the background. His 1308 bull Unam Sanctam makes several claims that remain important to contemporary theological discussion. Boniface speaks of two swords: the spiritual and the temporal. Both… Read More Boniface VIII’s Two Swords and the Theologians
by Matthew Gaetano For reasons that continue to perplex me, some of our readers still think that we at TRF don’t take seriously the fundamental theological debates of the Reformation. It seems to me that, while we are obviously interested in inter-confessional dialogue, we have also been quite clear about our conviction that the controversies of… Read More Keckermann on Transubstantiation