THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
75
The proclamations of the magisterium are over here,
< - - - and here we are, over here,
establishing a 'critical distance,' and
trying to understand them.
The sacramental authority of the magisterium flows from the
sacrament of Holy Orders. In principle, then, the idea that Christ
himself protects the sacraments through the sacraments, including
through the sacramental orders of the Holy Father and the bishops that
are united with him, is no more or less hard to swallow than the root
sacramental sign of Catholicism: "This is My Body, This is My
Blood." Indeed, Fr. Keefe shows at length that New Class Catholicism
doesn't -- can't -- take any of the sacraments seriously. A 'critical
distance' is -- must be -- established, not only from Holy Orders, but
also from Penance, Baptism, Matrimony, and, most especially, from
the Eucharist, the heart of the Church. The establishment of the 'critical
distance' is the logical thing -- the 'grown-up' thing -- to do, and so it is
done.
One of the hardest things Catholics will have to do in order to
understand and to correct (in other words, to convert, to evangelize)
New Class Catholicism, is to accept the intellectual incoherence of
traditional Catholic thought. New Class Catholics really are -- literally
-- our brothers and sisters in the faith, even intellectually. Their
thought is directly related to traditional Catholic thought, as fully and
deeply related as brother is related to brother, sister to sister. New
Class Catholics are simply more consistently applying the inherent
logic of an intellectual paradigm fully accepted within traditional
Catholic thought. Indeed, within traditional Catholic thought that
intellectual paradigm is more than fully accepted, it is central, as the
following representation shows:
[ GRACE ]
NATURE
or, in other words:
[ The special class of things (the Trinity, the Eucharist,
etc.) that can be known only by divine revelation, over
here
]
< - - - and everything we can ever
learn, discover, or think about, over
here.
Faithful Catholics may not be able to evangelize even their own
brothers and sisters, New Class Catholics, let alone the modern world,
until they understand that this most traditional 'solution' to the
conundrum being discussed here is formally identical to what happens
when the thoroughly secular scientist Mr. Steven Pinker's 'solution'
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