I doubt that the priest was thinking along these particular lines but I cannot know since he has taken his book offline. However this should serve to illustrate that these theological explorations are very difficult and that we should not be so quick to judge what seems from the little I have read to have been a highly nuanced exposition which was misleading to some as the holy priest noted due to the use of jargon and other theologically machinery:
Let’s set aside the Incarnation, and just focus on the Trinity itself, the ontological Trinity. Though one can truly say that the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God (note in some languages “God” and “divine” are actually the same word), it is also true that the fullness of the divinity is in the Father in a way not so with the Son and Spirit, though the Son and Spirit are also nevertheless wholly divine, not partly divine. It is kind of complicated to explain but the Father alone is the origin of the whole divinity. This is taught in the Catechism and also has been reaffirmed by the Holy See in documents arising out of dialogue and a desire to reconcile with the Orthodox lung of the Church:
Catechism of the Catholic Church:
By this confession, the Church recognizes the Father as “the source and origin of the whole divinity”.
Note that the Son is not the source or origin of the Spirit. This was clarified by the Holy See as I mentioned. The Father is logically prior to the Son and the Spirit so in that sense the Son and Spirit are “contained” in the order of logical priority in the fullness of the Father whereas the reverse is not true (not in the order of logical priority, that is; it may be true in the reverse in some other order as some theologians have speculated).
Aquinas and Augustine seem to shed a little light on this:
newadvent.org/summa/1031.htm
I answer that,
When we say, “The Father alone is God,” such a proposition can be taken in several senses. If “alone” means solitude in the Father, it is false in a categorematical sense; but if taken in a syncategorematical sense it can again be understood in several ways. For if it exclude (all others) from the form of the subject, it is true, the sense being “the Father alone is God”–that is, “He who with no other is the Father, is God.”
In this way Augustine expounds when he says (De Trin. vi, 6): “We say the Father alone, not because He is separate from the Son, or from the Holy Ghost, but because they are not the Father together with Him.” This, however, is not the usual way of speaking, unless we understand another implication, as though we said “He who alone is called the Father is God.” But in the strict sense the exclusion affects the predicate. And thus the proposition is false if it excludes another in the masculine sense; but true if it excludes it in the neuter sense; because the Son is another person than the Father, but not another thing; and the same applies to the Holy Ghost. But because this diction “alone,” properly speaking, refers to the subject, it tends to exclude another Person rather than other things.
Hence such a way of speaking is not to be taken too literally, but it should be piously expounded, whenever we find it in an authentic work.
I disagree with Aquinas on some points here, but the point here is that perhaps the holy priest failed to “piously expound” on some ambiguity in his work. But he’s apologized for that. He’s probably gone to confession for that. What more do you want? We should be a church that forgives and realizes that he is no more a sinner than we just as Hitler is no more a sinner than we for the gulf that separates the infinite holiness of God from the moral imperfection that we are is an infinite one, whether it be the gulf between God and saint or God and demon. Before the holiness of God, all are equal and we are no more than dust.
(I’m unsubscribing from this thread so sorry if you reply and I don’t get back to you)
