Saturday, October 15, 2022

Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick on the Immaculate Conception of Mary and its Relationship to the Deposit of Faith

During Vatican I, the archbishop of St. Louis, Peter Richard Kenrick (1806-1896) delivered a speech on June 3, 1870. What he said about the Immaculate Conception (which had been elevated to the position of a de fide dogma on December 8, 1854), is striking:

 

Theology as a science is to be carefully distinguished from faith or the body of credenda. It sets forth the truths of faith in systematic order, and proves them, in its way of proving, either positively or scholastically, and deduces sundry conclusions from truths explicitly or implicitly revealed, which, for distinction’s sake, are called theological conclusions. These conclusions, not being immediately and necessarily connected with revealed truths, so that the denial of them would be deemed a denial of those truths themselves, cannot be elevated to the rank of truths of faith, or propounded as such to the faithful at cost of their everlasting salvation. Propositions contradictory of them may be condemned as erroneous, but not as heretical.

 

In the Vatican Council, this distinction does not seem to have been observed. The result—a thing unknown hitherto in Councils—has been that the bishops are divided among diverse opinions, disputing, certainly not about doctrines of faith of which they are witnesses and custodians, but about opinions of the schools. The council-chamber has been turned into a theological arena, the partisans of opposite opinions, not only on this question of the infallibility of the pope, but on other subjects, exchanging blows back and forth with the hot temper which is more common in theologians than in bishops, and is not becoming to either; * for all acknowledge the Roman pontiff, united with the body of bishops, to be infallible. Here we have a doctrine of faith. But not all acknowledge him to be infallible by himself alone; neither do all know what is meant by that formula; for different parties offer different interpretations of it. Here we have the opinions or views of the schools, about which (as if fair enough) there are all sorts of mutual contradictions.

 

It may be objected that by this line of argument I assail the definition of the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin by the bull Ineffabilis Deut; since this opinion was for centuries freely denied by many, and was afterwards erected into an article of faith by the bull aforesaid, with the consent and applause of the body of bishops, as appears from their acts and writings, many of them having been present at the pontifical definition. Speaking for myself alone, I gave the following frank reply, which perhaps will meet the approval neither of my friends nor of others. For a fuller reply, I refer to my Observations, in the Synopsis, † the sum of which is as follows: I admit that the blessed Virgin Mary through the singular favor of God, and in view of the merits of her Son Jesus Christ, was kept in her conception from all guilt of Adam’s sin. I do not deny that the sentiment belongs to the deposit of faith; nevertheless, I have never been able to discover it therein, so far as that deposit is set forth in the Scriptures and the writings of the fathers; neither have I never found the man who could show it to me there. The assent of “the Church Dispersed” (as it is called) proves that the definition to which that assent is given is not in contradiction to any revealed truth; since, as I have already remarked, the church, whether in council or dispersed, can tolerate nothing which contradicts the faith. The pious opinion was always cherished among the faithful—an affection which the church encouraged, and by the institution of the Feast of the Conception, almost sanctioned. But it never delivered it as a doctrine of faith, and popes have strictly forbidden that the opposite opinion should be branded with the mark of heresy by its opponents. If any one should deny that it is a doctrine of faith, I do not see what answer could be made to him; for he would reply that the church could not so long have tolerated an error contrary to truth divinely revealed, without seeming either ignorant of what the deposit of faith contained or tolerant of manifest error.

 

 

[* Compare with the expression of Archbishop Manning’s solemn declaration as to what did not occur—“scenes of indecent clamor and personal violence, unworthy even in laymen, criminal in bishops of the church.” Petri Privilegium, 3.28. The coincidence of expression is curious, one bishop giving the facts as they happened, and the other the facts as they did not happen.]

 

Synopsis Observationum, pp. 234-238

(An Inside View of the Vatican Council, in the Speech of the Most Reverend Archbishop Kenrick of St. Louis, ed. Leonard Woolsey Bacon [New York: American Tract Society, 1871], 136-38)