Really curious

[Serious]

In aother thread someone wrote:

Cardinal Newman wrote:

The Church holds it better for sun and moon to drop from Heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in the most extreme agony… than that one soul… should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth or should steal one poor farthing…

Two questions:

1. Does anyone have a source, which would substantiate that Carrdinal Newman actually said something like that?
2. Is this really the official standing of the church? Is there a source for this?

 

[Khalid]

I’m pretty sure Newman did say that, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the teaching of the Church.

 

[Serious]

I’m pretty sure Newman did say that, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the teaching of the Church.

We shall just have to wait, I guess. When asking if that quote was itself the official teaching of the church, obviously I did not mean if that particular sentence was to be found verbatim somewhere among some official teachings. Rather if the meaning of the sentence: “the detrimental results of some inanimate forces” are preferable to the “results of some human sinful act”, even if that sin is only venial. Since the ethics of church is not teleological (or utilitatian) rather deontological, I would not be surprised at all if that would be the official teaching.

I take Neuman’s assertion as: “if the painful and horrible demise of all the humans could be prevented by any, even a small and venial sin, the proper act would be to refrain from performing that act, and let the whole human race perish”. But we shall have to wait and see.

 

[Dorothy]

It sounds to me like Newman was using exaggeration to spotlight how hideous sin is and we should pray to be holier and avoid it.

 

[Serious]

Well, it sure looks like he really said it in ih book published in 1864 titled: “Apologia pro vita sua” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia_Pro_Vita_Sua) . So we can forget about that part. Of course, the really important question is: “is this utterance in accordance with the official teachings of the church?”. It probably is considering the beatification of Newman (Birmingham, 2010). Is it just a “mild” exaggeration? Or is it to be taken verbatim or almost verbatim?

 

[Khalid]

We shall just have to wait, I guess. When asking if that quote was itself the official teaching of the church, obviously I did not mean if that particular sentence was to be found verbatim somewhere among some official teachings. Rather if the meaning of the sentence: “the detrimental results of some inanimate forces” are preferable to the “results of some human sinful act”, even if that sin is only venial. Since the ethics of church is not teleological (or utilitatian) rather deontological, I would not be surprised at all if that would be the official teaching.

I take Neuman’s assertion as: “if the painful and horrible demise of all the humans could be prevented by any, even a small and venial sin, the proper act would be to refrain from performing that act, and let the whole human race perish”. But we shall have to wait and see.

I always thought the Church was at the extreme end of virtue ethicism, not deontology. Of course there is some “deontology”, in the sense of “rules”, but not in the modern Kantian sense of the term that I believe has become the primary meaning.