“Inviolability of Conscience” is Nominalist Gibberish

toothpaste

Last Friday, the headlines from Rome screamed, “Archbishop Cupich lays out pathway for gay couples to receive Communion at Vatican press scrum,” a story so ribald it reads like something out of the heretical works of the Marquis de Sade. Archbishop Cupich of Chicago laid the whopper on the tableau of reporters that he can see a day when “… people come to a decision [on divorce] in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that.”

Really, Archbishop Cupich? Is this the inerrant word of the Paraclete or a Vatican version of Bill Clinton’s “that depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is?”According to Webster, inviolable means:

inviolable: adjective in·vi·o·la·ble \(ˌ)in-ˈvī-ə-lə-bəl\
1: secure from violation or profanation <an inviolable law>

Fr Vincent Serpa recently defined “profane” in the context of Church teaching. “Profane” as an adjective is defined:

[S]howing irreverence toward God or sacred things.’ Certainly, there are degrees of the profane just as there are degrees of the sacred. [emphasis mine]

Either Bishop Cupich doesn’t know how to use proper English terminology and we are therefore left only to guess at his non-meaning meaning, or he meant to say that the conscience is incapable of profanity. If the conscience is incapable of profanity or profane thinking, then I wonder what exactly is to blame for actual profane actions? A “bad” god, a la the Manichæan heresy? We might let the Archbishop slip if this was a one-off comment made after a gleeful rally of the Adulterers for Communion Club, but Cupich repeated the statement and applied it to unrepentant adulterers and homosexuals seeking sacraments.

But “profane” has a definition. It has meaning. We should therefore apply these understandings to what is being said and see if the “conscience” is capable of committing or allowing to be committed, profane acts, thus making it the opposite of “inviolable”. We consult thus, St Thomas:

“For conscience is said to witness, to bind, or incite, and also to accuse, torment, or rebuke. And all these follow the application of knowledge or science to what we do: which application is made in three ways. One way in so far as we recognize that we have done or not done something; “Thy conscience knoweth that thou hast often spoken evil of others” (Ecclesiastes), and according to this, conscience is said to witness. In another way, so far as through the conscience we judge that something should be done or not done; and in this sense, conscience is said to incite or to bind. In the third way, so far as by conscience we judge that something done is well done or ill done, and in this sense conscience is said to excuse, accuse, or torment. Now, it is clear that all these things follow the actual application of knowledge to what we do.” [emphasis mine]

St Thomas cannot be misunderstood because his logic is based on the reality of human affairs, not the fantasized version of affairs the Francis modernists dream of, pace Freud. Cupich’s “reasoning” is yet another sad testament to the heresy of Nominalism that has infected the thinking of far too many Catholic clergy. This “puffed up” thinking, as Augustine says, comes from the vice most sin derives from: Pride. Cupich et al concoct “teachings” and “pastoral guidance” on their own, rather than subject themselves to the humiliation of admitting that beyond magisterial guidance and the advice to pursue grace through penance, mortification, and prayer, they are helpless to assist the adulterers and sodomites.

Catholics For a Free Choice ad; 1984

Catholics For a Free Choice ad; 1984

This is precisely what the “Catholic” pro-abortion crowd did after Roe, which culminated in a disastrous series of newspaper advertisements in the New York Times – placed by “Catholics For A Free Choice.” There were 84 “Catholic” signatories, and though they did not sign the ad, prominent Democrat “Catholics” — including New York’s governor Mario Cuomo, Congressmen Tom Daschle, Leon Panetta and Geraldine Ferraro — all signed a brief in 1982 that gave the group an official sounding imprimatur of sorts.

Following the publication of the ads were demands from the Holy See that public retractions be made upon penalty of excommunication. This became a decade-long battle that Pope John Paul II lost and “pro-choice Catholics” won. That I am aware of, there has not been a pro-abort politician claiming Catholicism as their “faith” who has faced excommunication since; and the laity, aided and abetted by a magisterially-anemic clergy have tragically followed suit.

Today, many believe it is perfectly acceptable to be “Catholic” and also “pro-choice.”

This is the Cupich/Kasper/Francis gambit: bring the issue to the Holy See’s level, accept doctrinal defeat and then wage an all-too-easy PR war on behalf of  “Catholics For a Free Marriage,” – a name I admit to coining, but will not be shocked to see actually used. If you think this is just the column inch of a desperate Catholic media hack, consider this from über feminist “theologian” and pseudo-Catholic, Rosemary Ruether, written at the time of her aforementioned NY Times ad. (Ruether was ring-leader of Catholics For a Free Choice.) Note the laughable fear that Vatican II could be “put back in the toothpaste tube”:

“The Second Vatican Council, simply by being a church council, represented a reassertion of this more pluralistic approach to teaching authority, over against the papal absolutism of Vatican I. Thus, if the Vatican conservatives intend to rescind Vatican II at the November synod, they will be endeavoring to bury the conciliar tradition itself once again, as an alternative source of teaching authority which can check and balance papal power. It is almost certain, however, that the ‘toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube,’ as one nun expressed the question of getting American nuns back into habits. The same slogan can apply to the efforts to get Catholics in America, and throughout the world, back into the habit of unquestioning obedience to authority, once they have gotten used to thinking that they too are the church.”

Ruether’s conclusion is the precise Nominalist gibberish we should expect to appear in newspapers and TV ads starring Susan Sarandon, Ellen DeGeneres (raised Catholic in New Orleans), and Justin Bieber the moment the Synod concludes. From this, the de facto policy of American Catholics will be asserted as “accommodating” homosexuals and serial adulterers (which an unrepentant adulterer will surely become). It will be the vocation of the Church Militant and her orthodox faithful to piously stand athwart this apostasy, yelling “STOP!”

Here’s more from Ruether:

“Catholics are thrown willy-nilly into deciding for themselves which parts of the Christian tradition are meaningful and which are not, with little guidance from bishops, priests or theologians. Thus Vatican absolutism promotes the very chaos which it most fears. There is no way back to the absolutism of the past. There is only a painful way forward to a church in which people try to listen to and respect differing opinions and to work, through a combination of experience and tradition, to develop teachings that have authority because they are credible to most Christians.” [emphasis mine]

If you are not mortified of the thought that Modernists will be roaming Catholic vestibules creating “teachings” based on Americans’ “experience,” then you haven’t been to a typical Novus Ordo Mass on a Sunday during NFL or NASCAR season. We are at a time as a “Christian nation” that — to channel British essayist Gerald Warner writing at the dawn of President Obama’s coronation — “will end in tears.” Warner continued:

The Obama hysteria is not merely embarrassing to witness, it is itself contributory to the scale of the disaster that is coming. What we are experiencing, in the deepening days of a global depression, is the desperate suspension of disbelief by people of intelligence – la trahison des clercs – in a pathetic effort to hypnotise themselves into the delusion that it will be all right on the night. It will not be all right.

Replace “Obama” with “Pope Francis” and you have the recipe for moral disaster. Rosemary Ruether’s campaign of death to the unborn with a Catholic/Christian imprimatur reached critical mass in 1984. Barring a divine intervention, 2015 will be remembered as the Francis cabal’s “1984.”

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