Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Romano Amerio on the Loss of Doctrinal Unity in Roman Catholicism Post-Vatican II


Many pop-level Catholic apologists often appeal to the (purported) unity one can have if they embrace Roman Catholicism. The problem is that, especially in the modern period (Post-Vatican II), this is simply false. As Catholic priest Romano Amerio wrote on this issue:

Loss of unity of doctrine in the Church

Since a thing’s unity is a sign of its being, the condition of its being can be judged from the degree of its unity, inasmuch as it falls to pieces as its unifying principle weakens. Ens et unum convertuntur is true of moral entities no less than physical ones. A molecule ceases to be with the breakup of the atoms of which it consisted. An animal ceases to be the moment its mass of cells loses the vital link that made it one organism. By the same token a moral entity loses its being when it loses its own unity. The Church consists of numbers of people undivided among themselves and divided from all other groups, and insofar as it is a community, that is a Church, it is one. This one Church is kept in being by a unifying principle through which individuals exist as one. The level of being of that community which is the Church can be determined from the level of its unity.

Now, in the present circumstances, its unity is fractured in three respects: doctrine, worship and government. The doctrine taught and preached by the Church’s ministers used once to be uttered with united voice. Now, however, it is the same diocese from parish to parish, and within the same parish from preacher to preacher. Instead of being merely that difference in color, presentation or feeling regarding a single body of truth which is right and inevitable when speaking on any subject, these differences represent an alternation of dogma, cloaked in a policy of adapting the presentation of the faith to the character and expectation of contemporary men. Private theorizings grow even bolder. The doctrinal corruption of priests either precedes or follows that of the bishops. The latter, in turn, issue individual pronouncements that differ among themselves, and by generally tolerating or sanctioning the deviations of their priests, the bishops have allowed a general confusion to reign in the Church on matters of faith, and have thus caused a deplorable weakening of unity among the faithful. Doctrinal unity used to be a peculiar characteristic of the Roman Church and was recognized and admired by those outside; it was also a reflection of the internal processions within the Holy Trinity, since in principio erat Verbum (“In the beginning was the Word”) and nothing can be achieved in the Church without the Word.

The lack of doctrinal unity that had already began to emerge at the council, but which was there treated as a symptom of freedom and vitality, was manifested very openly by the appearance of Humane Vitae, and thereafter in a host of publications that bishops consented to by their silence, that is, when they did not actually intervene publicly to defend the errors of their priests against the complaints by the laity. The faithful have a right to compare the teaching of an individual minister with that of other ministers and ultimately with that of the supreme teaching office. This right comes from their sharing in the teaching office of Christ conferred by baptism, and carries with it an obligation to reject  false teaching in the internal forum, that is, in their own minds, and, if circumstances require, to attack it publicly as well.

As we have seen this doctrinal corruption has ceased to be restricted to small esoteric circles and to be governed by a kind of disciplina arcani (“Guarding of the secret”): it has now become public in the body of the Church through sermons, books, schoolteaching and catechesis, which latter has often fallen into the hands of lay people with insufficient knowledge and a thirst for novelty. This obscuring of Catholic doctrine is not altogether unconnected with the procedures of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Office, and which have delegated the watch over orthodoxy that used to be exercised by the Holy See to the care of the bishops, who are less doctrinally instructed and less firm; nor is it unconnected with the lack of attention given to the cultural level of candidates when appointing new bishops to dioceses. (Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century [trans. John P. Parsons; Kansas City, Miss.: Sarto House, 1996], 715-17, emphasis in bold added)