One of the many common statements made about our new Pope in his role as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith is this bit of boilerplate "enforcer of the church’s doctrinal purity." This is said as if this statement itself is a condemnation. Why is it that liberals never describe the EPA as the "enforcer of environmental purity?" That they will fight to reduce some contaminate to a 12 parts per million but rail at the though of uncontaminated and pure doctrine. Why is purity important in your drinking water and not also in your doctrine? If knowing the truth so that you may prepare to live with God forever is important, then there should be an equal fight to retain doctrinal purity with no contaminates. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
Pope Benedict XVI nailed it when he discussed the "Dictatorship of relativism." Progressives want relativism so that they may first say their belief has equal footing to any other belief. Though relatively clean water they wouldn’t accept. Give me both clean water and clean doctrine so that when we drink at the wells of Holy Mother Church that we won’t be slowly poisoned. I am all for zero parts per million of heresy in our doctrine.
3 comments
Thank you for your gift of wit. You have a good (lighthearted and fun) connection to reality. Keep ’em coming
excellent.
Some very Chestertonian stuff here. Very suggestive of this:
…in all this mere unification of traditions, true or false, there is something that may be quite simply described as dull. But the dogmas are not dull. Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve, but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues, so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line. It is the custom, though by this time already a rather stale custom, to complain that the Greeks or Italians who disputed about the Trinity or the Sacrament were splitting hairs. I do not know that even splitting hairs is any drearier than bleaching hairs, in the vain attempt to match the golden hair of Freya and the black hair of Cotytto. The subdivision of a hair does at least tell us something of its structure; whereas its mere discoloration tells us nothing at all. Theology does introduce us to the structure of ideas; whereas theosophical syncretism merely washes all the colours out of the coloured fairy-tales of the world.
The Thing CW3:303-304