(The first article in this series can be read here – A Catholic’s Analysis Of Exclusion – Part 1. The lettering in this article has been changed from how it was initially published to reflect that it follows on from Part 1)
May it be emphasised that in the exercise of his supreme authority a Pope instructed all Catholics to anathematise (exclude) purveyors of errors which he listed.
Nearly a hundred years subsequently, however, another Pope declared a contrary policy, sometimes summarised as “See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.” In his speech opening the Second Vatican Council, Pope St. John XXIII said that “often errors vanish as quickly as they arise, like fog before the sun.” The Church, he said, had always opposed errors, and often “condemned them with the greatest severity,” but now preferred “to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity,” believing that “she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations.”
To that he added the gross and complacent misjudgment that condemnations were unnecessary because widespread errors were “so obviously in contrast with the right norm of honesty, and have produced such lethal fruits, that by now it would seem that men of themselves are inclined to condemn them, particularly those ways of life which despise God and His law or place excessive confidence in technical progress and a well-being based exclusively on the comforts of life. They are ever more deeply convinced of the paramount dignity of the human person and of his perfections, as well as of the duties which that implies.” If that had been true, the inculturation of egregious sin in subsequent decades would not have occurred.
It might be suggested that even if Pope St. John had issued condemnations they would not have prevented the subsequent disasters, because contra-Catholic revolution was the ‘spirit of the age,’ and therefore the better response was for the Church to try to limit the damage by adopting a ‘positive’ tone (still displayed, especially by Pope Francis). Pope St. John said, in his speech opening the Council on 11th October 1962, that the Church wanted “to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness.” As if love and condemnation are incompatible. Pope Pius IX was no less mindful of love. His list of anathematisations arose from love’s dimension of distinguishing truth from falsehood, and thereby to protect people from Satan’s snares: “just as God wills all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, just as Christ came to save what was lost and to gather into one the children of God who were scattered abroad, so the church, appointed by God to be mother and mistress of nations, recognises her obligations to all and is always ready and anxious to raise the fallen, to steady those who stumble, to embrace those who return, and to strengthen the good and urge them on to what is better.”
“Let no soul fear to come to me, even if its sins are as scarlet,” said Our Lord to St. Faustina Kowalska.[1] Our Lord said also, ‘Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect’,[2] and ‘The Father and I are one’.[3] So Our Lord’s ‘open door’ for sinners is an aspect of the perfection to which we are called. Perfection does not, however, require abstention from identifying and actively opposing heresy: Jesus came to bear witness to the truth [4] and to destroy the works of the Devil; [5] truth and love are not served by “let[ting] the wolf tear the sheep to pieces”. [6] Events did not vindicate Pope St. John’s hope that a policy of tolerance and positivity would be enough to counteract errors and their results; “it seems as if over the past 50 years the more the Church has opened itself to the world the more the Church has been overwhelmed by it.” [7]
D. The Catechism of the Catholic Church
Vatican I cannot have been unmindful of the relevant Biblical texts when preparing and promulgating the list of ‘anathemas,’ but the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (paragraph 1443) notes that Our Lord “reintegrated forgiven sinners into the community of the People of God from which sin had alienated or even excluded them.”
The Bible is the inspired word of God.[8] He cannot contradict Himself; as Vatican I declared, “God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth. The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.”
In contemplating what looks like a difficulty of reconciling instruction to exclude and Our Lord’s concern to ‘bring back the lost sheep,’ perhaps the following will be a helpful conclusion, although reached in ignorance of (and subject to) any Magisterial analysis and resolution of the puzzle.
It is essential to distinguish between truth and error. The supreme authority in the making of that judgment is not the individual [9] but the Magisterium. [10]
“To teach in order to lead others to faith is the task of every preacher and of each believer.” [11]
“[T]he proclamation of Christ by word and the testimony of life…is accomplished [by lay people] in the ordinary circumstances of the world.” [12]
“By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will.” [13]
“[L]ike all the faithful, lay Christians are entrusted by God with the apostolate…, they have the right and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth” [and] “[t]his duty is the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear the Gospel and know Christ.” [14]
Therefore the laity should have a particular inclination towards reconciling people with the Church (Christ’s institutional instrument). This is the laity’s “[p]articipation in Christ’s prophetic office.” [15]
Everyone, through his God-given gifts, is a witness and living instrument of the Church’s mission, according to the extent of what God has given him. [16] Because, however, the Church is, and has always been, by divine establishment a hierarchical society, the laity’s initiatives are taken in their own name (except in the sense of being motivated by desire to promote conformity to Christ); they have no authority to speak and act in the name of the Church, except to the extent that such authority is entrusted to them by appropriate ordained ministers. [17]
The time for repentance continues for as long as mental capacity does. Our Lord wishes every soul to be saved, [18] but He has acknowledged that during His patience there are situations in which people can legitimately be treated as excluded from His flock. [19] ‘Bad apples’ and ‘bad eggs’ endanger the ‘health’ of the others, so love for the healthy requires isolation of the unhealthy. The objective for people (as for food) is perfection, [20] so exclusion can be justified if needed to avoid exposure to false belief, occasions of sin (“Bad company ruins good morals” [21]), and/or to avoid giving scandal;[22] the Church has authority for such exclusion. [23] The evidence set out above shows that individuals must have prudent ability to take similar action.
2. Can exclusion, or anathematisation, be effective?
Efficacy cannot be judged unless the purpose or primary purpose being pursued is known. One wonders whether the efficacy of exclusion (whatever the reason for it) has been the subject of any research-projects. Research may, however, be superfluous, because surely common sense suggests at least two certainties.
(i) Benefit for the ‘excluder(s)’. If exclusion is intended to protect the ‘excluder(s)’ from (as suggested above) exposure to false belief, from occasions of sin, and/or from risk of giving scandal, it can be effective in achieving those purposes.
(ii) Benefit for the excluded. We should always want an offender to repent and reform. In considering whether exclusion can produce that effect in the offender, much will depend on whether the excluded person believes that being cut off is too high a price to pay for the relevant offence. If the exclusion is for one of the three purposes mentioned in (i), that decision will depend on the excluded person’s ‘sense of sin’ (the expression is used here broadly, to encapsulate those three purposes) and on the extent to which (as St. John Henry Newman wrote in “Lead, Kindly Light”) pride rules the will.
A. ‘Sense of sin’.
Somebody who cannot understand that he is regarded as a danger may be handicapped in ability and/or willingness to change appropriately. Danger in spiritual terms seems often not recognised by those who pose it. That is because the ‘sense of sin’ has diminished, calamitously, within the Church as well as outside it, and therefore the faith no longer has anything like the same hold on people as in time past.
A particularly good review of the subject is contained in Pope St. John Paul’s 1984 Apostolic Exhortation entitled “Reconciliatio et Paenitentia.” In section 18 of it he wrote of many signs indicating a widespread serious clouding of moral conscience (the facility by which people discern the difference between good and evil). The clouding occurs when consciousness of God weakens, “and with the loss of this decisive inner point of reference, the sense of sin is lost.”[24] Throughout mankind’s history, sin has been and remains a free act by which someone does not acknowledge the sovereignty of God’s law over his or her life, at least at that particular moment of transgressing that law.[25] Although factors outside and within a sinner may reduce to varying extents a sinner’s freedom and therefore his responsibility and guilt, it is a truth of faith that an individual is free, and the merit for virtue or responsibility for sin cannot be transferred to other people or circumstances.[26] “Since by sinning man refuses to submit to God, his internal balance is also destroyed and it is precisely within himself that contradictions and conflicts arise. Wounded in this way, man almost inevitably causes damage to the fabric of his relationship with others and with the created world. … [I]n society…it is easy to see the signs and effects of internal disorder.”[27]
One of the most common errors in modern times seems to be the opinion that God’s law does not apply to what is done with voluntary consent. The extensive effect of that opinion should be obvious. “[T]here is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly individual one, that exclusively concerns the person committing it. With greater or lesser violence, with greater or lesser harm, every sin has repercussions on the entire ecclesial body and the whole human family.”[28] It can become so vast a phenomenon that the individual participants almost ‘disappear,’ and it is regarded as a ‘social’ (or, increasingly in today’s parlance, a ‘societal’) matter, but, wrote Pope St. John Paul, that “must not cause us to underestimate the responsibility of the individuals involved.”[29] They are responsible for their own contribution to the large-scale sinful situation; “At the heart of every situation of sin are always to be found sinful people,” and, unless they abandon their sin, attempts to eradicate its social dimension are unlikely to succeed:[30] “The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.”[31]
B. Pride.
The “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” paragraph 1866, declares pride’s effect but not its meaning. Pride is designated as a “capital sin,” because it leads to other sins, but we must look elsewhere (in our intelligence or in comments made by other people) to find what pride is rather than what it does.
The ordinary meaning of pride is, surely, excessive confidence in or assertion of one’s own ability, and/or superiority, and/or (usually because of the latter factors) entitlement to deference or obedience. The “Oxford Dictionary of English” (2nd edition, revised, 2005) defines it (more lengthily) in terms similar to that suggestion.
Pride will tend to produce resistance to the change(s) of behaviour which caused exclusion. The result will be a ‘battle of wills,’ lasting until surrender by the ‘excluders’ or the excluded person.
Because a sense of sin and the extent of pride vary, experience probably cannot provide a general rule in answer to the question of whether exclusion, or anathematisation, can procure repentance and reform of the excluded person.
[1] Diary of St. Faustina, 11, 138, echoing Isaiah 1:18 and confirming the testimony of St. Paul in 1 Tim. 1:12-16.
[2] Matt. 5:48.
[3] Jn. 10:30.
[4] Jn 18:37.
[5] 1 Jn 3:8.
[6] Pope St. Pius X, Letter to the Clergy of the Dioceses of Venice and Mantua, 5th September 1894.
[7] Requiem Mass for deceased ‘old boys’ of St Philip’s Grammar School, Birmingham; The Oratory, Birmingham, 18th November 2017.
[8] Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 105-107.
[9] 2 Pet. 1:20.
[10] “Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 119, 816, and 890.
[11] Ibid., paragraph 904.
[12] Ibid., paragraph 905.
[13] Ibid., paragraph 898.
[14] Ibid., paragraph 900.
[15] Ibid., paragraphs 904 et seq.
[16] Ibid., paragraph 913.
[17] Cf. ibid., paragraph 875.
[18] Ibid., paragraphs 605, 982, 1037 and 2822, and 2 Pet. 3:9-10.
[19] Matt. 18:15-17; Lk. 9: 5, 10:10-11.
[20] Matt. 5:48.
[21] 1 Cor. 15:33.
[22] “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” paragraphs 2284-2287.
[23] E.g., ibid., paragraphs 1463 and 2272.
[24] “Reconciliatio et Paenitentia,” section 18.
[25] Ibid., section 14.
[26] Ibid., section 16; see also “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” paragraphs 1755 and 1756.
[27] Ibid., section 15.
[28] Ibid., section 16.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.