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remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2013-0531-p-crenshaw-weigel-ottaviani.htm
Cardinal Ottaviani Responds to George Weigel
Peter Crenshaw POSTED: May 30, 2013
REMNANT COLUMNIST
In his latest column, George Weigel, presents his thesis that the once Traditional Catholic doctrine — “error has no rights” — has now been adopted by the leftist political state and is the cause of Christian persecution in Western democracies. Conclusion: Cardinal Ottaviani, staunch defender of this Catholic teaching, is having a subdued and sorrowful “last laugh” recognizing the irony and tragic consequences of his own outmoded Pre-VCII thinking on Church/State relations. While there is a lot of irony in Mr. Weigel’s column, the tragedy is in the fact that Weigel fails to grasp it.
To his credit, Weigel does a good job of capturing Cardinal Ottaviani’s prediction of the fruits of Vatican II style “religious liberty”:
As a legal scholar considering the future of society, Ottaviani’s fear was that religious freedom would result in religious indifference and then a collapse of religious conviction, which would in turn lead to state hostility toward religious believers and religious institutions.
Can anyone doubt that the Cardinal’s prediction has come to pass?
Furthermore, this tragic sequence of events was not simply the personal “fear” of Cardinal Ottaviani. These consequences were well known as the fruit of going down this path for centuries. Pope Gregory XVI saw clearly what this idea had in store for society back in 1832, stating:
This most putrid font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous view or rather insanity, that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws–in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.[1]
Weigel then attempts to demonstrate how what “appeared” to be Catholic pre-VCII teaching on the matter for centuries, namely that “error has no rights”, was neatly corrected by Vatican II:
[Ottaviani’s] theological argument against religious freedom, widely held in the Roman universities of the day, rested on the proposition that “error has no rights.” The council’s response to that claim was that persons have rights, whether their religious opinions be erroneous or not, and that, in any event, states lack theological competence.
Yet, Cardinal Ottaviani himself anticipated and eloquently refuted this response in 1953, twelve years before Dignitatis Humanae was published:
The objection is made, “almost all of those who up until now have tried to mediate and to examine the problem of ‘religious pluralism,’ have run up against a dangerous axiom, the statement that truth alone has rights while error has none. As a matter of fact all agree today that this axiom is misleading, not because we want to recognize any rights as belonging to error, but simply because we agree on this fundamental truth, that neither error nor truth, which are abstractions, are the objects of rights, are capable of having rights, that is of engendering mutual duties between person to person.”
It seems to me, on the contrary, that the fundamental truth consists rather in this: that the rights in question have very well as their subjects those individuals who find themselves in possession of the truth; and that other individuals cannot demand the same rights by title of the error they profess.
And, in the encyclicals we have cited, it appears that the first Subject of these rights is God Himself. From this it follows that only they who obey His commands and who possess His truth and His justice have true rights.[2]
Weigel then goes on to make the startling revelation that modern democracies seem to now be adopting the Traditional Catholic doctrine of “error has no rights” and using it to take rights away from the Church. What Weigel fails to grasp is that the maxim, “error has no rights” is just that; a maxim. A maxim is defined as a general or fundamental truth. It is a reality. “Error”, if it is to have any meaning at all, means those ideas and beliefs contrary to the Catholic Faith. Thus, modern democracies are not using “error has no rights” as their battle cry at all. Instead their motto can be summed up as “Truth has no rights.”
Every type of error, on the other hand, has a legal right to be heard in these states. This should not come as a shock to Weigel, as it is the natural eventual consequence of his notion of “religious freedom” or what Pius IX more properly referred to as “the freedom of perdition.” Cardinal Ottaviani demonstrated the real-life consequences of this doctrine in 1953, presciently giving the example of the “religious freedom” policies of the then Soviet Union. See if the following sounds familiar:
Click HERE to continue.
Cardinal Ottaviani Responds to George Weigel
Peter Crenshaw POSTED: May 30, 2013
REMNANT COLUMNIST
In his latest column, George Weigel, presents his thesis that the once Traditional Catholic doctrine — “error has no rights” — has now been adopted by the leftist political state and is the cause of Christian persecution in Western democracies. Conclusion: Cardinal Ottaviani, staunch defender of this Catholic teaching, is having a subdued and sorrowful “last laugh” recognizing the irony and tragic consequences of his own outmoded Pre-VCII thinking on Church/State relations. While there is a lot of irony in Mr. Weigel’s column, the tragedy is in the fact that Weigel fails to grasp it.
To his credit, Weigel does a good job of capturing Cardinal Ottaviani’s prediction of the fruits of Vatican II style “religious liberty”:
As a legal scholar considering the future of society, Ottaviani’s fear was that religious freedom would result in religious indifference and then a collapse of religious conviction, which would in turn lead to state hostility toward religious believers and religious institutions.
Can anyone doubt that the Cardinal’s prediction has come to pass?
Furthermore, this tragic sequence of events was not simply the personal “fear” of Cardinal Ottaviani. These consequences were well known as the fruit of going down this path for centuries. Pope Gregory XVI saw clearly what this idea had in store for society back in 1832, stating:
This most putrid font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous view or rather insanity, that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws–in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.[1]
Weigel then attempts to demonstrate how what “appeared” to be Catholic pre-VCII teaching on the matter for centuries, namely that “error has no rights”, was neatly corrected by Vatican II:
[Ottaviani’s] theological argument against religious freedom, widely held in the Roman universities of the day, rested on the proposition that “error has no rights.” The council’s response to that claim was that persons have rights, whether their religious opinions be erroneous or not, and that, in any event, states lack theological competence.
Yet, Cardinal Ottaviani himself anticipated and eloquently refuted this response in 1953, twelve years before Dignitatis Humanae was published:
The objection is made, “almost all of those who up until now have tried to mediate and to examine the problem of ‘religious pluralism,’ have run up against a dangerous axiom, the statement that truth alone has rights while error has none. As a matter of fact all agree today that this axiom is misleading, not because we want to recognize any rights as belonging to error, but simply because we agree on this fundamental truth, that neither error nor truth, which are abstractions, are the objects of rights, are capable of having rights, that is of engendering mutual duties between person to person.”
It seems to me, on the contrary, that the fundamental truth consists rather in this: that the rights in question have very well as their subjects those individuals who find themselves in possession of the truth; and that other individuals cannot demand the same rights by title of the error they profess.
And, in the encyclicals we have cited, it appears that the first Subject of these rights is God Himself. From this it follows that only they who obey His commands and who possess His truth and His justice have true rights.[2]
Weigel then goes on to make the startling revelation that modern democracies seem to now be adopting the Traditional Catholic doctrine of “error has no rights” and using it to take rights away from the Church. What Weigel fails to grasp is that the maxim, “error has no rights” is just that; a maxim. A maxim is defined as a general or fundamental truth. It is a reality. “Error”, if it is to have any meaning at all, means those ideas and beliefs contrary to the Catholic Faith. Thus, modern democracies are not using “error has no rights” as their battle cry at all. Instead their motto can be summed up as “Truth has no rights.”
Every type of error, on the other hand, has a legal right to be heard in these states. This should not come as a shock to Weigel, as it is the natural eventual consequence of his notion of “religious freedom” or what Pius IX more properly referred to as “the freedom of perdition.” Cardinal Ottaviani demonstrated the real-life consequences of this doctrine in 1953, presciently giving the example of the “religious freedom” policies of the then Soviet Union. See if the following sounds familiar:
Click HERE to continue.