CDF NEGATES CATHOLIC DOGMA INDICATES CATHOLIC APOLOGIST MARK SHEA

CDF NEGATES CATHOLIC DOGMA INDICATES CATHOLIC APOLOGIST MARK SHEA




In an article, Can Non Catholics be Saved? , InsideCatholic.com, Mark Shea apologist writes Fr. Leonard Feeney was excommunicated for heresy.

He writes,' Rev. Leonard Feeney was excommunicated for insisting that only people in visible communion with the Catholic Church could be saved.’

It may be mentioned that Fr. Leonard Feeney taught that defacto everyone needs to enter the Catholic Church through Catholic Faith and the Baptism of water to go to Heaven and avoid Hell –and there were no exceptions.

This was the dogma of the Council of Florence and the Bull Sanctum of Pope Boniface. It is the teaching of Evangelii Nuntiandi of Pope Paul VI and Redemptoris Missio and Dominus Iesus of Pope John Paul II. It is referred to as the thrice defined dogma of the Catholic Church.

So if the Holy Office (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,CDF) excommunicated Fr. Leonard Feeney for heresy, then it means, the dogma has changed. It means there is a new doctrine.

It would mean the Vatican has changed the teaching on extra ecclesiam nulla salus and so it is no more a dogma.

It would mean that the past popes were not infallible and neither is the present Holy Father.

It would mean objective reality at the supernatural level has changed and the 1949 Letter refers to this change i.e. to avoid going to Hell the dogma said one must be a Catholic. This was the objective reality taught by Jesus and His Church over the centuries. So now objective reality has been changed by the CDF Mark Shea indicates.

Yet there is no new Catholic Revelation which indicates this change happened.

So if the Letter says Fr. Leonard Feeney was excommunicated for heresy (it does not) then it must mean that the cardinal who issued it was in error.

If for example there is a new pope tomorrow and he rejects the dogma of exclusive salvation in the Catholic Church, then he is fallible.

Since in faith and morals the Holy Father is always infallible, provided he teaches according to Sacred Tradition. Otherwise he would be considered an anti-pope,

This is implied by Mark Shea whose article of 24.10.2009 is a repeat of the one he wrote a few years back in Crisis magazine.

FR.LEONARD FEENEY’S COMMUNITY OF MONASTIC MEN GRANTED CANONICAL STATUS BY CATHOLIC CHURCH: BOOK ON FOUNDER

A Catholic monastic community which has just published a book in praise of Fr. Leonard Feeney one of their founders has been given canonical status by the Catholic Church.

From  the website of St.Benedict Abbey : Our History

Saint Benedict Center began in 1941 as a student center in an old furniture store in Harvard Square on the corner of Bow and Arrow Streets, just a half a block from the Harvard Yard. It was directly across the street from the Romanesque front porch of St. Paul’s Church, Cambridge’s renowned “university church.”

The three original founders were Catherine Goddard Clarke, Avery Dulles (then a Harvard Law student) and Christopher Huntington, a Harvard dean. Catherine Clarke went on to help found the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Avery Dulles is now a Jesuit and a Cardinal, living at Fordham, and Christopher Huntington became a priest out on Long Island, New York.

Recalling his early days at the Center, Avery Dulles wrote, “At the Center, the Catholic Faith was never just abstract doctrine to be memorized for an examination but it was always a truth to be lived and prayed.”

In 1942, Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J. began to visit. By late-1944, however, both Catholic and non-Catholic students were so charmed by Father Leonard that Catherine Clarke, felt compelled to ask Archbishop Cushing if it were possible for him to arrange for Father Feeney, then still on the faculty of the Jesuits’ major seminary, to be assigned as the Center’s chaplain. The recently-installed archbishop said he was so impressed by what he had heard of Father Feeney’s work in stimulating Catholic students in the practice of their faith and in attracting many non-Catholic young people to study about the Church, that when he was presented with Mrs. Clarke’s request he happily relayed it to the also-newly-appointed Jesuit provincial for New England, Very Rev. John J. McEleney, S.J. The provincial, too, endorsed the request, and on December 17, 1944, Father Feeney became the full-time chaplain and spiritual director of St. Benedict Center.

Many years earlier, on November 12, 1916, after he had set the cornerstone for St. Paul’s Church, Cardinal O’Connell warned that “there is very grave danger, not far distant from this sacred edifice.” He warned Catholics that at Harvard “prominent educators are striving to undermine the foundation of all truth, the source of all knowledge, of all life – Christian faith.”

Such sentiment was, quite literally, cast in bronze awhile later when Rev. John J. Ryan – who spent all thirty-six years of his priesthood at St. Paul’s and who personally designed the brick-and-sandstone church, chose the motto for the bell that would hang in its belfry. Recognizing that its peal would resound through Harvard Yard, Father Ryan directed the artisans who cast the instrument to have the mold carry the inscription: vox clamantis in deserto (“a voice crying in the wilderness”)

The old guard among the Boston Yankees, which the classic “Harvard man” typified, was growing increasingly alarmed at the sheer number of Roman Catholic personalities moving into major public roles. They sought to blunt this Catholic ascendancy by promoting a sort of pietistic nationalism in which no religion could dominate the culture.

Father Leonard believed with all his heart that the work of priesthood – his priesthood – was to assist in bringing souls to Christ. “Why,” he would ask with Pope St. Leo the Great, “should you take the honor of the priesthood if you will not labor for the salvation of souls?”
There is no question that his lectures on those Thursday nights in Cambridge stressed the imperative for young people to be Catholic – not only to be saved, but in order to live normal, fruitful lives – at Harvard or elsewhere. Abbot Gabriel (pictured on the right with Fr. Feeney in 1946) recalled, “I can remember his singling out Adams House, the residence hall where I lived, directly across the square from the Center, after a suicide was reported, and saying, “If you want to save your sanity and save your soul, you have to become a Catholic.” As events confirmed, such audacity, coupled with Father Leonard’s advice to certain students to withdraw from Harvard and Radcliffe and other institutes – Catholic as well as not-Catholic – because their Catholic Faith was being compromised, were the seeds of confrontation.

Those years immediately following the end of World War II, after all, ushered in a period of great opportunity and phenomenal growth – in membership and resources – for the immigrant Catholic Church in the United States and there were those – perhaps including Archbishop Richard J. Cushing and his auxiliary, Bishop John J. Wright – who did not want anything to distract the forces in play.

That the Catholic Church, in the persons of both leaders and followers, reacted as it did to the preaching of Father Feeney and the other members of the St. Benedict Center family was evidence, Holy Cross Professor O’Brien observed, “of a new concern for respectability which caused Catholics to moderate their quite orthodox message of exclusive salvation.”

That’s where the problem started. To hold what generations before had held about the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation did not jibe with the advent of “no-offense religion.” It didn’t go with the American scene.

Saint Benedict Abbey,
252 Still River Road,
P.O. Box 67,
Still River,. MA 01467,USA