78 Chapter 6
ONE MODERN SILLINESS
[ One ]
and the Many
[ "Grace" ]
and "Nature"
[ "Faith" ]
and "Reason"
[ the sacramental reality of Christ's presence given in
and through the Church's worship ]
and everything that seems
reasonable to us
This creates a few problems for Catholics! The problems were
always 'resolved' successfully by the saints, but at the expense of their
intellectual commitments, which they simply abandoned, if they
thought (or it was pointed out to them) that continuing to commit to
them caused their thinking to turn away from the sacramental realities
they were trying to understand more deeply. However, that in no way
fixes the intellectual incoherence, which remains.
It is plain embarrassing to have a centuries-old, quasi-'official'
explanation for the truths of the Catholic faith that is formally identical
to an explanation that can be used to 'explain' absolutely anything
which otherwise makes no sense:
[ 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.
[ Insert your favorite irrational belief here ]
< - - - and please place all
rationality, everything we can ever
learn, discover, or think about, over
here.
Nonetheless, this embarrassing correspondence does serve to
expose the intellectual incoherence and scientific vacuity of New Class
Catholicism, which takes as its project the adoption of a 'modern'
intellectual and scientific framework, in order to create the proper
'critical distance' from Catholicism. For example, Fr. Berard L.
Marthaler, O.F.M. Conv., professor, Department of Religion and
Religious Education, Catholic University of America, a highly
influential New Class Catholic,
1
has written this about "borrowings"
made by his field, catechetics:
1. For proof of this, see Wrenn MJ,
Whitehead KD (1996). Flawed
expectations. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.