janeway529 #7
I would recommend reading Cardinal Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church if you haven’t already.
One has to be wary of *Models of the Church *as Fr Thomas Dubay, SM, in
Authenticity, p 247, explains: “On the one hand, it plays down excessively the institutional model, and on the other, it exaggerates as a criterion of value what modern men find to their liking.”
Fr Avery Dulles claimed that “the ordinary Magisterium of the Roman Pontiff had fallen into error,” in addressing the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1976, also claiming this gem: “Indirectly…the Council worked powerfully to undermine the authoritarian theory and to legitimate dissent in the Church…Vatican II quietly reversed earlier positions…on a number of important issues.” (CTSA Proceedings, 1976, p240-241).
There was mass confusion by Avery Cardinal Dulles in his earlier years after Vatican II, such as Th
e Survival of Dogma, 1971. Dulles writes, p 114: “The times call for an ‘epochal’ reinterpretation of the very notion of ‘magisterium’ ……Contemporary techniques of government, teaching and communications would seem to harmonise at least as well with the demands of the gospel as do the feudal and absolutist patterns of the past.” On pp 117-120, Dulles professes explicitly the doctrine of the historical and cultural relativism of the Dogmas of the Catholic Church – “Man’s religious knowledge is necessarily embedded in contingent notions that depend on particular cultural circumstances…(making) the dogmas of the faith subject to reconceptualization.” Totally false and in keeping with Karl Rahner. [Cf *The Teaching Church in Our Time, Daughters of St Paul, 1978,
The Faith and the Theologies, Msgr Eugene Kevane, Notes p 54].
ON THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH (HPR, A-Sep, '99)
In reviewing
Faces of the church: meditations on a mystery and its images. By Geoffrey Preston, O.P., edited by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503, 1997), x + 310 pgs., Fr. John-Peter Pham Champaign, Illinois writes:
“In his much-heralded
Models of the Church with which he intended to identify some of the main trends in twentieth-century ecclesiology, grouping the positions by type (or model) and considering the criticisms directed from each against the others, weighing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.
“Regrettably, two unfortunate consequences arose from Dulles’s otherwise significant work. First, legions of lesser theological minds, rather than ponder the complementarity of his models, by and large took to them cafeteria-style: electing one over the others as the pre-eminent model. Thus, if one were to survey contemporary ecclesiology on the basis of the Dulles taxonomy, one would find an overwhelming option by fashion-conscious theological writers for the servant model — albeit with some lip-service to the herald model — to the wholesale neglect of the institutional, communion, or sacramental models. All, of course, to the impoverishment of ecclesiological science. Second, by the very fact that it attempts a taxonomy, Dulles’s approach, even in its best light, detracts from the mystery which is the Church at her essence.”
To his credit, Fr Dulles was able to renew himself and ceased to promote such error and dissent. He was made a Cardinal.
Fr Avery Dulles, SJ, later wrote: “The distinction between the Church as holy and its members as sinful has a long and venerable history. The Second Vatican Council, following Pius XII, carefully avoided speaking of the Church itself as sinful or as committing sins…The great ecclesiologist Charles Journet, in an article on the ecclesiology of Vatican II, pointed out that while from a purely empirical point of view the Church may appear to be sinful, the eye of faith is able to discern that the Church in its theological reality as Body of Christ is sinless, albeit not without sinners.”
Should The Church Repent,
First Things, Dec 1998].
