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To: Vicomte13
You did not ask for an infallible list of infallible teachings. You asked for a list. If you wish to take issue with a particular item that Ott or Denzinger list as "de fide" and if you wish to assert that it is not infallible, be my guest. We can debate that. But then you are setting up your own list.

If you or I were sufficiently notorious in our claim that document X or statement Y of Ott's or Denzinger's de fide listings are or are not de fide, if we developed a following and the issue became a church-dividing issue, then the bishops would need to take it up and clarify whether Ott's or Denzinger's item X or Y is or is not infallibly decided. Certain issues that to any normal person would seem to have been definitively declared de fide keep getting challenged by some knuckleheads (women's ordination, contraception etc.). In response, the Church keeps making definitive statements. Of course there's no master list that has an infallible imprimatur but there is the list known as the Catechism of the Catholic Church which itself was a response to the idiots who refused to accept the definitive collections of Trent and Vatican II, who persisted in giving an interpetation to Trent or Vatican II doctrines that was contrary to them.

Until 1570, no such Church-generated list was needed; theologian-generated private initiative lists sufficed. The various decrees of the councils were out there, the equivalents of Ludwig Ott and Denzinger made compilations (e.g., Peter Lombard's Sentences, Aquinas's Summa. These were "lists"--exactly what you asked for. They were not infallible lists, but you did not ask for such. Because Protestants did exactly what you are doing--challenged the up-to-that point accepted non-infallible lists/compendia of various levels of authoritative and infallible teachings as not binding, Catechism of the Council of Trent for the first time compiled an official list of authoritative teachings. So there's another list of the sort you asked for. No, that list was not itself giving de fide authority as a list--it didn't need that because the components of it already were authoritative at various levels.

The 1993/1997 Catechism was simply the successor to the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Precisely because people like you used the niggling argument that "no real list" of infallible dogmas exists, hence no one can really know for sure what's infallible and what's not, for that reason the bishops asked in 1985 for a new "list" of authoritative teaching, not merely a manual compiled by a theology professor (Ott), which served quite well against the background of Trent and the Catechism of Trent but which nigglers had kept challenging. So the 1993/1997 Catechism was compiled. That's your most authoritative list right now, to which Ott is an older supplement. Ott doesn't include Vatican II, so obviously it doesn't list everything--ordination of women had not even come up as a real issue until the stupid Anglicans who claimed to have real sacraments "ordained" women, so Ott won't be helpful there. But had dissenters not been such nigglers, a revised Ott would have sufficed--and Denzinger-Schoenmetzer-Huenermann was regularly revised and would have sufficed, except that people were using the silly argument you use: "there's no real list," "there's no real list," "ha, ha, gotcha, there's no real list."

You've got your list. It's the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As a list it's not infallible and doesn't need to be because it contains in it the infallible and the less-than-infallible but still to be humbly received doctrines of the Church. It is a list compiled not merely by a theology professor but by the bishops of the church and approved formally by the pope. It's not "infallible" in the silly way you ask it to be but it is a list and highly authorititive list. Sniff at it if you wish. It's what you asked for, a list.

245 posted on 11/29/2005 6:38:28 PM PST by Dionysiusdecordealcis
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To: Dionysiusdecordealcis

I asked for a list in which I could be certain, and stated that there wasn't such a list.

One person responded that there was a list: Ott's.
But that's his opinion. It's not an official list.

The other is the Catechism, which you suggested. But you've said that's not infallible either.

So, there is no infallible list of what's infallible.
Which means that any doctrine can be changed, if it needs to be, because nothing nails down the Church to anything.
The change in limbo is disconcerting.
The change in meatless Fridays, and the teachings that have come about because of it, is disconcerting given all of the weight that was placed on that in the past.

In the catechism is a strong prohibition on war and the death penalty. Is this infallible teaching?


333 posted on 11/30/2005 6:56:52 AM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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