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Does the Church need another Thomistic realignment?

  • 06-06-2020 12:17pm
    #1
    8kczg9v0swrydm
    Closed Accounts Posts: 119 ✭✭


    Are the language and concepts which we use in our theology today too unclear and fuzzy?

    One thing I appreciate about St Thomas Aquinas and books written in the Thomistic tradition is their clarity. You read Thomas and, most of the time, you understand exactly what he means (sometimes it takes a couple of read-throughs :)). Thomistic manuals, for dogma, ethics, moral theology or spirituality, are priceless for this reason.

    I think today's language just lacks that clarity, that crispness and sharpness. Phrases like 'listen to your heart', or 'the pastoral solution' or even the misuse of the concepts of charity or prudence grind my gears.:) Sometimes there is just a lot of yammerin', but nothing gets said.

    Is it time for another Aeterni Patris? (An encyclical of Leo XIII which led to a revival of Thomism).

    Just to make it clear, I am not advocating for a shelving of the Second Vatican Council, nor a return to the Latin Mass etc.


Comments

  • #2
    Thinkingaboutit
    Registered Users Posts: 2,180 ✭✭✭Thinkingaboutit


    The Mass of Ages should return. The collapse in vocations and practice since has been just astounding. Places like Belgium, once utterly Catholic are now no longer anything. Perhaps there are more observant Moslems there than Catholics, but that's a really low bar, nowadays meaningless. People are not stupid. They are told everyone is saved, that migrants and recycling is more important, than being 'rigid,' on the rare times they make a clear point.

    A great many Conciliar bishops adore lengthy, near incomprehensible texts, which mean little once puzzled over long enough. JP2 gave bad example in that regard, but unlike most of them, he was trying to say something, making use of his philosophical training and thought. Sometimes they throw in a Greek word or two, half remembered from seminary, which is more in the service of making them seem clever than serving whatever point they have. If they wrote clearly, it would become just too obvious that this aged social justice activists have nothing to say. The Emperor would too patently have no clothes.

    Thomist concepts would be a hard ask for them, as none were trained in it, even degenerate neo-Thomism, and some are perversely proud of that. Nor have they any Latin, which a priest and religious would routinely have had well into the sixties. V2 was largely conducted in Latin. It was rare, for example, as with Cardinal Cushing of Chicago when a priest or bishop had no or weak Latin. The Latin of his Mass barely survived his old Chicago accent:



    Anyhow, plain English is kryptonite to the modern bishop. They have to hide that they have nothing to say.


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