Development and Newman

Every time the current regime has yet another doctrinal accident, 'developmemt' is invoked. The Graf von Schoenborn did it at the News Conference after Amoris laetitia when Diane Montagna asked whether that document contradicted Familiaris consortio. Leering down at her, he even had the condescending impertinence to mention Blessed John Henry Newman. During the Deathgate scandal, the same naughty little word has again been bobbing around in the troubled waters.

What few commentators appear to have pointed out is that Newman, when wrote his celebrated essay, had no intention of providing a blue-print to be cunningly used by future jesuitical pontiffs to disguise the reality of doctrinal change. He was describing what had happened in the past. And he was doing it as an Anglican to satisfy himself that the Catholic Church which he was on the point of joining had never changed its doctrine.

I do not recollect that during the Arian Controversy, or the Reformation disorders, either side ever justified the positions they tenaciously held by invoking Development. My impression is that each side simply bandied Scripture and Tradition cheerfully around so as to show that what they held was the truth "clearly" shown forth in Scripture and Tradition.

Bergoglianism has been encapsulated in an even more extreme form than this by the cynically blasphemous observation of the jesuit "General" that the Lord's Words were not captured on camera, and by Fr Rosica's boastfully candid admission that the Church is now entirely at the mercy of a pope to whom neither Scripture nor Tradition are prescriptive. Such exponents appear to offer a model of Christian teaching ministry unknown even to the heretics of earlier ages. Here we have not a heresy, but the supraheresy. Earlier heresiarchs may have monkeyed around with, and perverted the sense of, both Scripture and Tradition, but, I think, never before have we had the diabolical claim that a major heretical teacher is quite simply free from any control whatsoever within the Word of God whether written or orally transmitted. When I use the term 'diabolical', I mean it in the fullest possible sense. The fingerprints all over these preposterous claims are unmistakeable.

Some celebrated words in Pastor aeternus of Vatican I admirably taught that the Successor of S Peter was not promised the inspiration of the Spirit so that he could teach new doctrine, but so that by His help he could guard and faithfully set forth the Deposit of Faith handed down through the Apostles.

There is not, I think, any suggestion in this that he should energetically engage in "developing" it; still less, that he is totally free from its constraints.