THE P RTAL
April 2014
Page 12
Dogmatic
consistency
by Geoffrey Kirk
You know
what Anglo-catholics are like: they all have several reasons
for not joining the Ordinariate and are reluctant to tell you any of them.
They routinely assume – have you noticed this? – that you are somewhat to the
right of Opus Dei, and that in consequence you are embarrassed by Pope Francis.
‘How are you getting on with your Pope Francis?’
one of them asked me the other day. My Pope Francis!
I forbore to point out that the Pope is like a great work
of art or a public building: he necessarily belongs
to everybody. ‘He’s certainly put the cat among the
pigeons with his statements about human sexuality
and his questionnaire to ordinary lay people.’
I forbore to point out what my interlocutor had
clearly not noticed: that the process of election of a
Pontiff is organised to ensure that the resulting Pope
is a Catholic. ‘You’re going to look rather silly if he
decides to ordain women.’ I bit my lip.
frequent volte-faces of politicians, is inclined to think
that the Vatican operates in the same fickle way: new
Pope, new doctrine. Alas! Time will disabuse them of
that naïve superstition. If Pope Francis’s current media
celebrity is based on the assumption that his primary
task is to undo the life’s work of ‘Rottweiler’ Ratzinger
and John Paul II, we had all better prepare ourselves
for the fall-out. His popularity will be short-lived.
‘We declare that the Church has
no authority whatsoever to confer
priestly ordination on women.’
The glorious truth is that the Catholic Church is
radically ill-suited to be the servant of wall-to-wall
news 24/7. She moves in centuries, with one eye on the
eternal. If the media had any sensitivity to such things
they would even now be listening to the melancholy,
Now you can see why Anglicans think like that. long, withdrawing roar of the Second Vatican Council:
Living in a Church which can change its doctrine by the revision of the revision. But, like Anglicans, they
majority vote at any time, they suppose that everybody think that ‘reception’ is a one way journey which takes
is in the same boat. It would be fruitless to explain no time at all.
to them the virtue – nay the necessity – of dogmatic
consistency, for the simple reason that they do not
understand the nature and necessity of dogma. But on
From the age of fifteen,
the subject of the ordination of women, nothing could
dogma has been the
be clearer.
‘Declaramus Ecclesiam facultatem
nullatenus habere ordinationem
sacerdotalem mulieribus conferendi.’
‘Declaramus Ecclesiam facultatem
nullatenus habere ordinationem
sacerdotalem mulieribus conferendi.’
We declare that the Church has no authority
whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women’.
There you have it: ‘We declare that the Church has
no authority whatsoever…’ It is something – because
of her binding fidelity to the Lord – which the Catholic
Church cannot do. And the same, of course, applies to
countless other things.
Naturally, the secular press, used to reporting the
‘
fundamental principle of
my religion: I know no other
religion; I cannot enter into
the idea of any other sort
of religion; religion, as a
mere sentiment, is to
me a dream and a
mockery.
’
Bl John Henry Newman