#bouyer

We must not forget that the first Protestants had begun by being Catholics and, generally, desired to be fervent ones. What they fought against were errors and deformities that they were fully conscious of having once shared. Even today, despite all the progress made since the sixteenth century, can we deny that there is only too often, in our sacramental practice, superstition in disguise? Many Catholics, even the very devout, would seem to think that holiness for them was in direct proportion to the number of their Communions, even if they make no personal effort to receive the sacrament with fervor. And how many Catholics are there who have Masses said to obtain, come what may, something they are anxious for, even if its moral goodness is at least doubtful, and who expect therefrom a quasi-automatic result as if from some magical practice; in fact, they are doing well if they do not combine Christian practices with purely pagan ones, such as carrying lucky charms and the like.

Most unfortunate, it must be admitted, was a representation of the sacrifice of the Mass only too prevalent in late medieval theology, which envisaged it as primarily an action of the Church exercised on God to promote and increase the pouring down of his benefits on men. Quite certainly, the theologians who expressed themselves in this way were well aware that the sacrifice of the Mass exists only through the free gift God made us in Christ and therefore is itself pre-eminently a grace, and by no means a lever placed in man’s hands to constrain God in some way or another to benefit us. But formulas of this kind were only too like to give the ordinary people a purely magical idea of the Eucharist.

The traditionalist Lutheran churches are fairly sharply separated on this point [the purpose and nature of the Sacraments] from the other Protestant churches. In reality, they remain basically, even though incompletely, Catholic in their attitude towards baptism and, as they continue to call it, the sacrament of the altar. In their belief in the mysterious efficacy of baptism to bring about the grace of redemption, and in the real presence of the true body and blood of Christ under the sacred species, true Lutherans assign, at least to these sacraments, the place in the interior life that they have with Catholics. The only remark we might make, particularly in connection with the Eucharistic Supper (which, however, they continue to call the Mass in countries long Lutheran) is the almost exclusive focusing of their devotion on the individual gift offered to the believer. But we must not forget it was the same with all good Catholics too at the end of the Middle Ages… and how many are there who have never gone beyond this narrow point of view, even among the most devout?

… in contrast with the Fathers of the early Church, there has been a tendency to present the Word of God in Scripture on the one hand and in the Church’s tradition on the other as two distinct and complementary sources of the total Christian truth. This, however, is a quite untraditional idea; it is a very imperfect expression of the case and a fruitful source of misconceptions. First of all, the sole sovereign authority for the Catholic Church in questions of doctrine is the Word of God. Secondly, the Catholic Church holds too that this Word is preserved in Scripture in an entirely unique manner, since there and there alone is it expressed in formulas positively and directly inspired by God, which is not the case with even the most solemn definitions of the general councils or the popes. Thirdly, in the Catholic Church tradition is not something other than Holy Scripture and added to it, but is rather the entire living transmission of the truth, whose central organ is the inspired Scripture. Scripture is not illuminated or completed by tradition as by something foreign to it and superadded. On the contrary, we must insist, Scripture keeps its true and complete sense only when it remains a vital part of that living tradition of the Church in which the inspired writers actually composed it, making it, as it were, the essential deposit of this tradition. The Word of God is communicated to the Church and directs her through Holy Scripture, but through Scripture linked to all those things that make us see it as the deposit of a Word which is and will always be the word of life, which cannot be preserved apart from the life it itself creates and sustains.

… the Catholic Church does not maintain, and never has, that the bishops and the pope are “other apostles” in the strict sense of the word. She teaches something quite different, that they are “successors of the apostles”. What does this mean? There is not for one moment any question, nor has there ever been, that the bishops or even the pope may build anything at all on any foundation other than that laid by the apostles. They not in any way assume the role of new founders, more or less independent of the first. Their role is to preserve and transmit what was communicated directly by the apostles. The faith of the Catholic Church is not something different from the faith of the apostles. The Word proclaimed by the bishops is exactly that which the apostles were the first to teach.

The actual notion of reformation in itself holds nothing heretical; it is by an unceasing work of reform that the Church not only avoids altering the truth entrusted to her once and for all by Christ, but renews the living knowledge and possession that the faithful have of it.

At the very height of the Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas roundly affirms that the only possible basis for any doctrinal assertion is the Word of God, and, moreover, the Word of God as formulated by Scripture alone under direct divine inspiration, all other sources of tradition being able solely to throw light on this one foundation but not by any means to occupy the same plane, still less to replace it.

There is no doubt that for all the Fathers of the Church from Origen to Saint Augustine, the food of prayer was the Word of God, not just for an elite but for all the faithful worthy of the name. And not only in Christian antiquity but for the whole monastic tradition at least to the High Middle Ages, both for the black monks of Cluny and the white monks of Cîteaux, the only method of prayer known was what was called the lectio divina, that is, a personal reading of the Word of God, which aimed at the assimilation of its whole substance, a reading in faith, in the spirit of prayer, in which God was believed to be actually present, speaking to the individual through the text in question, and in which the person at prayer strove to make himself present to God in a spirit of obedience and of complete abandonment to his promises and also his demands.