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)
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