Posted on 07/01/2021 3:03:23 PM PDT by ebb tide
Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner was an immensely influential theological guru of a couple of generations of clerics and theologians. He is the darling, venerated oracle of the catholic left and modernists.
Here is a quote from Karl Rahner. Given the rumors about changes to or suppression of Summorum Pontificum, this quote should be picked up and circulated widely. Hat tip to my correspondent.
From Karl Rahner’s Studies in Modern Theology (Herder, 1965, pp. 394-395) under the subtitle:
[…]
Imagine that the Pope, as supreme pastor of the Church, issued a decree today requiring all the uniate churches of the Near East to give up their Oriental liturgy and adopt the Latin rite….The Pope would not exceed the competence of his jurisdictional primacy by such a decree, but the decree would be legally valid.
But we can also pose an entirely different question. Would it be morally licit for the Pope to issue such a decree? Any reasonable man and any true Christian would have to answer “no.” Any confessor of the Pope would have to tell him that in the concrete situation of the Church today such a decree, despite its legal validity, would be subjectively and objectively an extremely grave moral offense against charity, against the unity of the Church rightly understood (which does not demand uniformity), against possible reunion of the Orthodox with the Roman Catholic Church, etc., a mortal sin from which the Pope could be absolved only if he revoked the decree.
From this example one can readily gather the heart of the matter. It can, of course, be worked out more fundamentally and abstractly in a theological demonstration:
1. The exercise of papal jurisdictional primacy remains even when it is legal, subject to moral norms, which are not necessarily satisfied merely because a given act of jurisdiction is legal. Even an act of jurisdiction which legally binds its subjects can offend against moral principles.
2. To point out and protest against the possible infringement against moral norms of an act which must respect these norms is not to deny or question the legal competence of the man possessing the jurisdiction.
[…]
I recall that the late Michael Davies used this argument in one of his books in the wake of the Novus Ordo.
It is clear that a Pope would have the power, the juridical authority, to suppress the TLM (pace fans of Quo primum), but he clearly would not have the moral authority to do such a thing. It would be a…
“grave moral offense against charity”.
Merciless Pope Ping
If they pull the trigger on TLM suppression, as the Bishop of Dijon is bragging that they will do in the very near future (perhaps on the July 7th anniversary of S.P.?), I personally believe that it will be Bergoglio’s ultimate Waterloo. In Quo Primum, St Pius V warned that the wrath of Almighty God and SS Peter and Paul would come down upon anyone who attempted to suppress the Tridentine missal. Was that an empty threat? Stay tuned...
Paul VI got way with supressing the Tridentine Mass and now he's a "francis-saint".
I could be wrong about this, and I welcome correction, but I’m not sure that Paul VI ever explicitly came right out and said that the old missal was verboten. There was certainly a de facto ban, but it sounds like Bergoglio is threatening a de jure ban. We’ll see...
“Never. This Mass (the TLM) … becomes the symbol of the condemnation of the council. I will not accept, under any circumstances, the condemnation of the council through a symbol.”
An argument could be made that an opinion that Paul VI expressed verbally to a friend is qualitatively different than something like the official motu proprio that Bergoglio is alleged to have cooked up.
What a wrecking ball he is! He and most in the hierarchy truly hate the church.
Regardless, it’s an indication of Montini’s evil intent.
Why then were indults required to offer the TLM?
The first, I believe, was the “Agatha Christie” indult in 1971.
Indult is a term from Catholic canon law referring to a permission to do something that would otherwise be forbidden.
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