Mgr Guérard des Lauriers continues his analysis of Cardinal Ratzinger’s modernist theology – turning now to his account of divine revelation.
Introduction
This is the third part of our serialisation of Mgr Guérard des Lauriers’ article The Wojtyłan Dictatorship (La Dictature Wojtylienne), published in Bulletin de l’Occident Chrétien, nos 79 – 80 of April-May 1983. You can read the first part, on Archbishop Ryan and Cardinal Danneels, here.
In the second part, we saw Mgr Guérard’s analogy of the jar, the label and the content. Cardinal Ratzinger displays the Tridentine “jar” under the label “Tradition”, but places something quite different inside.
The second ‘Ratzinger Operation’: Revelation
In this part, Mgr Guérard turns to the second of Ratzinger’s three “operations”: his account of revelation.
Here, Ratzinger draws on his own early research. His Habilitationsschrift (composed in the 1950s) had been on the theology of history in St Bonaventure, who was himself writing in thirteenth century. His thesis attracted controversy, as he was seen as subjectivising the concept of revelation, and Ratzinger was left suspected of modernism. He was required to remove the sections on revelation, which were not published until decades later.
In the address under review, Ratzinger returns to this very subject. He claims that no one thought of calling the Bible “revelation” in the thirteenth century. Revelation was rather the act, “forever inexpressible in human words”, by which God makes Himself known, and its reception by man. On this view, Scripture merely bears witness to revelation. It is “the condensation of a much larger and inexhaustible process of Revelation”, in which the divine “I” and the human “Thou” meet in the “We” of the Church.
Mgr Guérard shows that this is neither the theology of the thirteenth century nor that of the Church. He answers with St Thomas himself, who says that our faith rests on the revelation made to the apostles and prophets who wrote the canonical books. He also answers with St Pius X, who condemned the propositions that revelation was not completed with the apostles, and that the formulas of faith are inadequate to their object.
What Ratzinger offers instead is a kind of “hyper-revelation”: a created entity lying behind the revealed propositions, which by its nature can never itself be revealed.
Mgr Guérard identifies the same tendency which we now know was suspected in the Habilitationsschrift, being presented three decades later to the faithful of Paris and Lyon – and as no less than a return to tradition. As with faith, Ratzinger’s vocabulary is scholastic and – to use Mgr Guérard’s analogy – is presented in a jar “labelled” as “Tradition”; but the content is the modernism condemned in Pascendi.
In the next part, we shall see the third and most audacious “operation”: his use of the structure of the Roman Catechism as a means of conveying and legitimising the new religion of Vatican II.
I look forward to sharing the parts of this “main course” with readers – but the dessert itself will also be worth the wait…
S.D.Wr.
The Wojtyłan Dictatorship: Mgr Guérard des Lauriers
Bulletin de l’Occident Chrétien, nos 79–80, de avril-mai 1983
Originally published as La Dictature Wojtylienne
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