"it never was heretical to deny that heretics must be burned"
But a hypothetical denial that heretics MUST be burned is not what is in question. That is a straw man. What is in question is whether it was heretical (for RCs) to assert "that the RC Church not only did not 'have to' authorise, permit or command heretics be tortured and/or burnt (simply for their error) in certain circumstances, but was FORBIDDEN to do so in any circumstances both by the Natural Law and revealed Gospel truth because these acts were utterly and intrinsically wicked, despite their having universal sanction for a very long period within the Western Church and, therefore, the RCC's Magisterium sinned grievously against truth and goodness in doing this".
If you don't think the above was heretical according to RC standards, then it could only be by ignoring the vast majority of RC statements on two subjects before the 20th Century: dealing with heretics and the inability of the Church to manifestly declare an action as permissible or obligatory which was in fact fundamentally immoral. Nor are you giving proper weight to the fact that this kind of statement outlined above was one of those condemned by the Pope who excommunicated Luther. Indeed, Luther's statement was weaker than mine: "It is against the Spirit to burn heretics".
Regarding the question of private judgement and the branch theory, what you have presented appears more assertion than argument so far. I would hope that your accusation that my comment was "distilled private judgement" was not based solely on the presence of the words such as, "the position I hold ... I am not so convinced, and neither are many EO-RC-Anglican Ecumenical theologians", especially since, first, my position is not merely personal but one expressive of the faith of my jurisdiction and other Catholic theologians in good standing with theirs and, second, it INVOLVES NO DENIAL MATERIALLY OR FORMALLY OF DOGMAS HELD BY THE RCC OR EOC. Indeed, that is its whole point!
I will also assume you do not hold that it is a sin of faithless private judgement/opinion to judge "who" the infallible Church is on other than the SOLE ground of a particular body saying it is the Church, since it is not possible to judge who the Church is solely by accepting its infallible statement unless one has already discovered it is the infallible Church, that is, except by begging the question. Instead, I will assume you hold it to be mere private judgement (and internally contradictory) to hold a belief about the infallible Church that is inconsistent with that Body's own purportedly infallible statements on the matter. As a corollary, I will assume that you posit that once one knows who the one infallible Church is, one must simply accept that Church's statements about who they are, in other words, one must avoid a "cafeteria Catholicism" that orders everything but the ecclesiology on offer!
If I understand you correctly your criticism is based on two correlative arguments:
1. It is not even sufficient to accept or claim to accept all the dogmatic doctrines of a Church you identify as Catholic. One must accept "DOGMATIC FACTS" as well. And the most fundamental dogmatic fact a Church claiming to be Catholic proposes is the claim to be THE Church. To deny this, even if only to qualify it by saying the said body is Catholic but not the whole Catholic Church is in fact to refuse to accept that Church's Catholic authority.
2. Any integral Communion claiming to be Catholic MUST claim to be the whole Catholic Church, since all Catholics believe in the visible unity of the Church almost by definition.
3. If there were no clearcut judgement allowing one to discern that only one of these Churches presently not in communion with each other is the true Church, the infallibility of the Church and the assurance it gives to its members (allowing them to accept doctrines on faith rather than merely as defeasible opinion) would utterly fail to be a practical reality. This is because if there were a plurality of inconsistent ecclesial voices making up the true Church, and only when they were seen to be consensual were their teachings binding, then we would be back to the private judgement of the individual Christian for choosing what to believe.
Oops. Three correlative arguments!
Now for my answers:
1. DOGMATIC FACTS are those that are necessary for the assurance of Christians in their believing and devotion, e.g., knowing who are truly invokable Saints and knowing which are true Ecumenical Councils. The assurance about these facts underlies the assurance about what is taught and prayed. My fundamental point about this is simple: It is necessary to know who is in the One Church, but it is not necessary to know infallibly who is not in it to get a sufficient level of assurance/guidance. There are two reasons I say this, one historical and inductive, the other deductive. First, the Church has never known or claimed to know with certainty that people or jurisdictions outwardly excommunicated at any particular time were in fact genuinely schismatic or heretical. On the contrary, some excommunications and anathematisations for heresy have been recognised later as erroneous, not because of heterodox premises but because of mutual misunderstandings etc. Second, as long as one can be sure that whatever the Church one recognises as "the Catholic Church" explicitly defines as infallible dogma is so, that is sufficient to undergird faith. Since the ecclesiological position I am defending says one CAN be sure of this if one is a member of the RCC, EOC, ACC and some other jurisdictions, then it does not intrude upon or attempt to falsify the fundamental DOGMATIC FACT noted above.
2. See above for refutation of this postulate insofar as it is held in a simplistic fashion. Also, cf. http://www.speroforum.com/site/a...sub=127&
id=2435
3. This objection would only apply to discernment of doctrines taught by the ITOM. As I implied above, doctrines taught by a "defining act", in other words, those taught by what any of the relevant Churches recognises as equivalent to the Extraordinary Magisterium (EM), must be accepted as substantially orthodox, even if they are imperfectly formulated. (If a particular jurisdiction claimed to have made such a decree, and it was definitively and finally anathematised by the other Catholic jurisdictions, that would show the first jurisdiction had left the Church, as has always been the case in the Church.) It is true that the position here defended makes discerning the ITOM somewhat more difficult, but not too much, given the enormous amount held in common uncontroversially by the RCC, EOC, etc. In the few places where an apparent consensus would be overturned, it is only a benefit, such as in the case regarding violence and freedom of religion. Also, it is not as if the discernment of the ITOM within the RCC, for example, is always immediately and clearly manifest as soon as a question is asked, even on exclusivist premises. Otherwise the debate on the ordination of women would have been settled straight away and every Catholic theolgian positing the possibility that women could be priests would have been excommunicated or subject to censure from the beginning. Mike, you
helpfully give the example of limbo as something that looked like it was under the category of ITOM to very many theologians, now to very few. Therefore, either way, discernment of what is in ITOM always involves some degree of opinion, therefore, until the EM settles the question.
To conclude, none of the particular Churches that make up the Catholic Church have definitively and infallibly required the denial of the full ecclesiality of the others. And none of those particular Churches have made any infallible and definitive statements (by their own criteria) that are heretical.
P.S. It is sometimes claimed that the EOC has made no defining acts even claiming to be equivalent to Ecumenical Conciliar status. This is an oversimplification. See Ware's "The Orthodox Church", Ch. 10, "Later Councils". Anglican Churches have never attempted to exercise the EM. However, nor have they rejected the EOC's dogma, and the ACC recognises the EOC as what it claims to be, namely, Orthodox and Catholic. The relationship with the RC EM has had to recover from a mutually polemical period so that underlying agreements could be discerned beneath the weight of misunderstandings, exagerrations, misrepresentations and confusion of common opinion with doctrine. This process is, Deo Volente, ongoing for Anglican and Roman Catholics.
My brain is officially fried. Enough for me for a while.
You can even feel free to refer to me as a "perp" (crim?), "self-deceived", "unctuous" or a Protestant. 
Too tired.
God bless.
I suppose I ought to have read this article/thread before commenting in the other one. I don't think I have much to add, other than to observe here as I did there that if you change the rules of the game I can be a winning pitcher for the Yankees. But then that is just restating what Mike has already said much more eruditely in the post.
Also, the "it is against the Spirit to burn heretics" bit can as easily be understood as a statement about capital punishment as about torture. Especially when we try to reconcile it with (e.g.) what Pope Nicholas I taught many centuries previusly about torture.
In general and as usual, we can find interpretations which result in a contradiction or (since words in general underdetermine concepts) we can find interpretations which do not, all depending on what agenda we bring to the hermeneutical party. But there isn't any rational interpretation which both meets the Church's own criteria for infallibility and results in a contradiction. To get that we have to change the rules of the infallibility game; and if we do that I can have my pennant.
Thanks, Zippy!
Fr Kirby writes:
What is in question is whether it was heretical (for RCs) to assert "that the RC Church not only did not 'have to' authorise, permit or command heretics be tortured and/or burnt (simply for their error) in certain circumstances, but was FORBIDDEN to do so in any circumstances both by the Natural Law and revealed Gospel truth because these acts were utterly and intrinsically wicked, despite their having universal sanction for a very long period within the Western Church and, therefore, the RCC's Magisterium sinned grievously against truth and goodness in doing this".
If you don't think the above was heretical according to RC standards, then it could only be by ignoring the vast majority of RC statements on two subjects before the 20th Century: dealing with heretics and the inability of the Church to manifestly declare an action as permissible or obligatory which was in fact fundamentally immoral.
Funny, that. You've presented an admirably clear summary of one rad-trad-RC critique of Dignitatis Humanae, which is that DH was heretical for both the reason you give and others. This is not the first time I've seen a non-Catholic cite, as evidence against the Catholic Church's claims for her own authority, exactly what some Catholic rad-trads cite as evidence that the current Catholic hierarchy, from the top down, is heretical and therefore illegitimate.
Of course I do not "ignore" all the past ecclesiastical actions, and corresponding statements, that are contradicted by DH. In my post I admitted them freely. My point is just that those past actions and statements do not add up to HP* being ITOM. And unlike you, I argue for that point on the basis of the criteria for ITOM used by the Catholic magisterium itself. Given as much, I have nothing to add to what Zippy has just said.
As for your defense of branch theory, I shall reply to that in the combox of the appropriate post.
Mike and Zippy,
Your key objection seems to be that I should use the RCC's own rules for determining what is ITOM to determine whether application of such rules leads to a contradiction with present teaching and thus undermines RC claims. But I only claim there would be such a contradiction if ITOM is combined with an exclusivist ecclesiology, and argue that such exclusivism is not absolutely necessitated by RC principles. And, more importantly, NOT ONLY HAVE I NOT CHANGED OR IGNORED THE FIRST PRINCIPLES/RULES THE RCC HAS SET AS TO HOW TO DETERMINE WHAT WOULD BE ITOM (again, assuming exclusivism), I HAVE APPLIED THE TRADITIONAL RULES AND YOU HAVE DISMISSED THEM.
To wit, your only evidence that I have "changed the rules" is an attempted "argument from absence" and a question-begging induction. For the first, we have:
"A moral blind spot that is manifest as an assumption of juridical practice does not a teaching definitive tendendam make. There's nothing in the Catholic magisterium's criteria for ITOM, or in canon law itself, to suggest otherwise."
Well, as a matter of fact the RCC magisterially stated in Auctorem fidei that the opinion "that the Church could establish discipline which would be dangerous [or] harmful" was "at least erroneous"! And the proposition that "The Church's infallibility extends to the general discipline of the Church" was generally accepted as "theologically certain" in the past (cf. Van Noort). While the RCC never commanded every Christian king or Church religious order at one time to torture or kill people for heresy, the "general" nature of its teaching that these acts were morally legitimate is manifestly established by repetition and constancy of particular regulations across time and the explicit and general condemnation of those who presumed to say the Church had no right to make the civil power "wield the sword" to protect orthodoxy. As I noted, the more recent documents do not explicate all the modes by which doctrine is taught by the Magisterium (when by a non-defining act), so one must look to previous official documents and the theological consensus. Yet, when I do this from RC sources, ironically, I am the one accused of changing the rules. Pot. Kettle. Black.
The second tack is to appeal to the modern RC magisterial teachings clearly contradicting the old teaching and say, "See? If it had been ITOM, they wouldn't have been able to do that. The very fact that they changed the teaching proves that it never reached infallible status!" But this begs the question being addressed, which is whether such change could *legitimately* occur based on *exclusivist* historical assumptions or whether a more inclusivist ecclesiology than is commonly accepted is necessary to justify it objectively. I am not concerned with the subjective process gone through by the syn- and post-Vatican II bishops and theologians to convince themselves, especially since the *reasoning* leading even to a
an infallible conclusion of the EM has never been considered intrinsically infallible by anybody. That they made the change was good, but one can assert God guided them to do what they clearly had to without assuming anything about how well they rationalised it. They did what they knew they had to, and dealt with the inconvenient facts of the past as best they could, no doubt. There is no reason for me to automatically grant as a premise that they must have done so with perfectly rational treatment of the evidence in their own tradition if they assumed exclusivism.
The best contrary point has been to mention Pope Nicholas I and thus prove that the pro-torture position was innovative originally, not a part of Holy Tradition. But I noted the same thing myself. The point is that the RCC has always condemned the idea that one can appeal to the magisterium of the past against the magisterium of the present, especially if the present magisterial doctrine is very long-standing. Why? Because to assume that one can make such an appeal is to assume that virtually the whole Church can fall into theological or moral error at a particular time. This assumption is effectively a foundation of Protestant ecclesiology. Along with the RCC, I reject such an ecclesiology. I am able to do it -- with honest treatment of history -- only by not restricting the Catholic consensus to what the Western Church thought, taught and practised in the later Middle Ages.
Fr Kirby:
...your only evidence that I have "changed the rules" is an attempted "argument from absence" and a question-begging induction...
Nonsense. I quoted the magisterial texts I consider most relevant, and argued that HP* does not satisfy the criteria for ITOM stated and applied in those documents. That's why I made the assertion you dismiss with the words above.
...the RCC magisterially stated in Auctorem fidei that the opinion "that the Church could establish discipline which would be dangerous [or] harmful" was "at least erroneous"!
But how is that statement to be interpreted? Does it mean that the Church cannot make a bad rule for the whole Church? As far as I know, no representative of the Magisterium today, and hardly any theologian as such, would maintain that the Church's infallibility extends to each and every discipline meant for the whole Church. That's as good evidence as any that the statement from AF must mean something different from what your argument requires. I suggest that the historical context of the controversy with the Jansenists be examined.
As I noted, the more recent documents do not explicate all the modes by which doctrine is taught by the Magisterium (when by a non-defining act), so one must look to previous official documents and the theological consensus.
Even if they do not "explicate all the modes" in which a teaching can bind the consciences of the faithful—which I do not concede—then what's left unexplicated is a matter of theological opinion, which as such does not bind either the Church or the consciences of her faithful. That's the ground you're operating on. But it doesn't prove a thing.
The second tack is to appeal to the modern RC magisterial teachings clearly contradicting the old teaching and say, "See? If it had been ITOM, they wouldn't have been able to do that. The very fact that they changed the teaching proves that it never reached infallible status!" But this begs the question being addressed, which is whether such change could *legitimately* occur based on *exclusivist* historical assumptions...
You've missed the point. Given that they changed the teaching, it is plain that they didn't believe the change couldn't "legitimately occur"—else they would have known they were discrediting the teaching authority they themselves continued to claim. The question then becomes whose interpretation of the criteria for ITOM is to carry greater weight. Forced to choose between that of the Catholic Magisterium itself and that of an Anglican-Continuum priest, you know which I'll pick. And that can hardly be said to be question-begging.
Of course your real agenda is to argue that the change is legitimate only on "inclusivist" assumptions not ruled out, and perhaps at least tacitly held, by the Catholic Magisterium. The question for us here, as distinct from the question for the Catholic Church herself, then become
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