The seminal document for the “hermeneutic of rupture” for the Dominican Third Order (oh, excuse me, Dominican Laity) is The Dominican Third Order: Old and New Style - Schillebeeckx E, OP. In this the author explicitly sets out the blueprint for destroying the old and replacing it with the new. This has been the marching orders for the “sing a new church” crowd for many years.
When pointing out to the Schillebeeckx sycophants, that they are following the advice of someone who had gone off the rails sufficiently to earn the rebuke of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the faith, they typically respond that this is the finest Dominican tradition, pointing to the Angelic doctor as someone who caught the ire of his contemporaries, who accused him of treading at or across the line of orthodoxy. By extension, then, they exonerate themselves, styling themselves as the beacons of an expanded orthodoxy, rather than narrow minded souls clinging to the past and afraid of anything new.
The point must be called; are they really what they are claiming so shamelessly?
But I say: the angelic doctor never rejected any of the received doctrine of his time, he looked for ways to go deeper in understanding it. He was never censured for denial of the truths of our faith. On the contrary, the so called lights of our age, be they Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Rahner, Ed. Schillenbugger, or Matthew Fox, all have abandoned the received deposit of faith in one dogma or another, and sought to replace it with something anathama to that faith. I suspect that this is why their disciples are quick to criticize the church, and equally quick to provide apologetics to the hesiarchs of the protestant deformation. Follow the blind man, fall into the pit; I read that in a good book.
I bring this up because it is the charism of St. Dominic which brings one to want to be a Dominican. The Schillebeeckan 'vision' (or hot flash?) is what? conformity to the world? which offers... what?
I'm off to Oregon for a few days for my niece's wedding on Sunday.
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Just to stir things up:
ReplyDeleteHas Fr. Schillebeeckx been rebuked by the CDF, or censured?
In the "old style" Dominican Third Order, would we be blogging ourselves, or would we be copying Father's talks?
Hi, Tom!
ReplyDelete1. Yes he has.
2. I know it's a rhetorical question, but you will notice I frequently post from Bp. Vasa's weekly editorials, and I also posted Fr. Vogt O.P.'s presentation to the LPC.
I have never actually read any Schillebeeckx and I don't think I want to...
ReplyDeleteHave fun at the wedding
I would call them the 'darks' of our age. Where Aquinas is literally 'ageless' these darks have one age, the 20th Century. This is the Century that G.K. Chesterton called the century of "uncommon nonsense." Boy, now that I think of it, if the 20th Century was uncommon nonsense, then what is the 21st Century? Maybe it will come to be known as the New Age of Faith!
ReplyDeleteTom,
ReplyDeleteThought a bit more about what you said and the answer is yes, we would. it is not necessary to destroy that which is in order to do something new; Like Thomas, who built seamlessly on the deposit of faith, so to the Third Order need not destroy itself in order to begin a new endeavor.
For what it's worth, the CDF has never censured Fr. Schillebeeckx. (My own suspicion is that this is because nobody really understands what in blazes he's talking about.)
ReplyDeleteI do recommend his 1963 book Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, and I don't remember anything objectionable in his "Old and New Style" essay. But I haven't been able to make head or tail out of the little I've seen of his from the 1970s on.
Tom:
ReplyDeleteThe lack of censure is not the same as an endorsement of orthodoxy.
I found this summary here
-- Sept. 15, 1986: Notification on the book "The Church With a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry" by Dominican Father Edward Schillebeeckx, saying the book was "in disagreement with the teaching of the church," particularly regarding ordination and the possibility of lay people presiding at the Eucharist. However, the doctrinal congregation did not apply any penalties to the Belgian-born priest, who already had retired from teaching.
Here's a list of the CDF documents on Fr. Schillebeeckx; they do not appear to be online in English, however.
Notification on the book «Pleidooi voor mensen in de Kerk» (Nelissen, Baarn 1985) by prof. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., September 15, 1986
Letter to Father Edward Schillebeeckx regarding his book «Kerkelijk Ambt» («The ministry in the Church», 1980), June 13, 1984
Letter to Rev. Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx regarding his christological positions, November 20, 1980
Declaration regarding the dialogues with Rev. Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx on certain aspects of his doctrinal christology, December 13, 1979
in his 1970 book "Christ" he denies the resurrection of Christ as a real event, writing: only we suffer from the crude and naive realism of what 'appearances of Jesus' cam t obe in the later tradition, through unfamiliarity with the distinctive character of the Jewish-biblical way of speaking
interesting discussion of this in "Christian Origins and the Question of God"
Regarding the documents of Vatican II, Wikipedia (sourced) has:
Schillebeeckx admitted “we have used ambiguous phrases during the Council and we know how we will interpret them afterwards.”