Dear Father,
Your humor is always refreshing. If you want to call yourself a heretic, that’s your choice. But for the sake of readers who may be unintentionally misled by your humor, I’d best respond with an explanation.
Let me start off with an analogy. Imagine a poor person is brought to court because he took some food that was not his without paying for it for his family who was on the verge of starvation. Regardless of circumstances, the person’s act by definition would be regarded as theft. The person is brought to court, but because of the mitigating circumstance of his situation, the judge does not declare him a thief and send him to jail.
Now, according to the rationale of Father’s humorous statement, because he was not declared a thief, the act of taking something that is not yours without paying for it would no longer be regarded as theft regardless of circumstances. One obviously sees the ludicrousness of that proposition (which is why Father presented it as a joke).
Though the previous analogy involves the realm of civil jurisprudence with regards to physical crime, the same thing applies in the realm of theology with regards to heresy. The key is the mitigating circumstance. In the realm of theology, this mitigating circumstance is called invincible ignorance. A heresy is a heresy is a heresy (just as theft is theft is theft), but whether one is convicted of heresy depends on the whether one is invincibly ignorant or not. If one is invincibly ignorant of heresy, one cannot be convicted of the sin of heresy (i.e., called a heretic) even if one’s belief is objectively heretical (just as the poor person objectively stole, but was not convicted of the crime of theft because of his mitigating circumstance).
Invincible ignorance can be caused by several factors. For our discussion, only one needs concern us – habitual ignorance. Habitual ignorance is that ignorance caused by constant and consistent lack of exposure to the knowledge of faith. It may also be the case that a person not only lacks exposure to correct faith, but is also indoctrinated and constantly exposed to an alternative faith. It is to be expected that such a person, if one day coming upon the correct faith, will on first impression, either due to a perception of alienation or to a mental obligation towards one’s existing beliefs, reject the correct faith. In effect, the ignorance is invincible – that is, cannot be reasonably overcome. Such a person with invincible ignorance will not be held morally culpable for rejection of the correct faith, and would not be guilty of the sin of heresy.
To be more explicit, pretend we are at a time when the Church was still one. A portion splits from the Church due to a heresy. I do not doubt that that first generation subscribing to the heresy, perhaps even the second generation, would be guilty of heresy because a knowledgeable rejection of the true faith has occurred. Afterwards, children are reared up in that schismatic Church, and all these children will ever hear, and their children after them and so on, will be their own version the faith, with either no exposure to the true faith, or an exposure to a mere polemic caricature of the true faith. In this case, they believe what they believe not because they reject the true faith, but because they were brought up in a different faith. Such people are and will be invincibly ignorant and are thus not culpable of the heresy of the first generation.
There are other factors involved as well, of course. The most relevant ones for our topic are malice and desire to be ignorant. If these mental conditions are present, invincible ignorance is no longer applicable, and the person can indeed be regarded a heretic.
God bless,
Greg
