Monday, January 4, 2021

Dom Prosper Guéranger on the Apostolic Origin of Rome's Dogmas and Why There is Scant Early Patristic Support for the Immaculate Conception

I have written about how, contra some errant Catholics, Rome teaches he de fide dogmas are apostolic in origin (see this post). This, of course, leads to many Catholics to speak from both sides of their mouth, to claim a dogma is indeed apostolic in origin (i.e., taught directly by Jesus to the apostles or, by the Holy Spirit, revealed to the apostles before the closing of the Deposit of Faith) and yet, try to answer the lack of evidence for such (and often, the explicit witness against such dogmas) “development of doctrine” is trotted out like a “get out of jail free” card.

 

Writing in 1850, 4 years before the dogmatising of the Immaculate Conception, Dom Prosper Guéranger wrote the following in an attempt to defend the apostolic nature of this teaching:

 

The Church is always the same, whatever period one considers. Tradition, as we have just said, is the church herself believing and professing this and that doctrine, and the witnesses one gathers from the monuments of history are only of any value because they represent the thought and teaching of that society which remains unchanging in her faith. If, in a certain century, her professions of faith are more developed than in another, that only means that this same Church, moved by the Holy Spirit who guides her, has judged it fitting for the well-being of her children to be more precise concerning what she had within her from the beginning, and we know that she is divinely assisted in this work of development.

 

What does it matter if, due to the loss of ancient evidence, we cannot always follow the exact progress of a doctrine through the centuries? Our eagerness to gather up the precious witnesses of the Fathers should not flag because of that; but when such beacons are lacking, it is not the Church there to supply for them with her unwavering, even dazzling light to which the Fathers do but contribute their own small glimmer, glimmers which are only of value because the Church is at their centre; a Church always divinely assisted, always vigilant, always pure, always without spot or wrinkle (Eph. 5, 27), believing today what she believed yesterday and what she will believe tomorrow, but perceiving it and teaching it with ever greater clarity and precision . . . If we now wish to explain how the Church can be in possession of such a truth, which is not explicit in Scripture, and which cannot be clearly deduced from previously defined dogmas, we find that we must conclude that the decree whereby God excluded Mary from the inevitability of contracting the stain of original sin, or to use the words of a notable part of the Schoolmen, God’s formal intention not to include Mary in the universal decree, could only be known to the Church by means of a formal revelation made by Jesus Christ himself and confirmed by the Holy Spirit, Who, according to Our Lord’s saying, would teach the Apostles, and we must understand with them the Church, all that He himself had said to them (Jn, 14, 26). (Dom Prosper Guéranger, On the Immaculate Conception [Paris: Julien, Lanier et Comp., 1850; repr., Farnborough, U.K.: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2006], 92-94, emphasis in bold added)

 

On the Immaculate Conception, see:


Answering Tim Staples on Patristic Mariology and the Immaculate Conception


On the veneration of images (a subtopic of the forthcoming debate), see:


Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons


Be sure to also check out the following Youtube video where I go through the overwhelming patristic witness against icon-veneration (a dogma in both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy):


A Case Against the Veneration of Images