When I was a simple curate in my (Anglican) Title Parish, I did my best to explain the Faith as lucidly and as vividly as I could. One Sunday, along came a visiting preacher, who made a great Thing about he called the Hic Et Nunc. And ... gracious me ... how impressed so many of the people were simply by his use of a Latin tag. It taught me one of the valuable lessons we all learn early in our Ministry: that very many of the laity are extremely gullible and terribly easily impressed ... particularly by charlatans who prey upon that gullibility.
The hyperbergolianistical Instrumentum laboris issued to guide the Fathers of the Amazonian Synod has been beautifully dissected by Cardinal Mueller. At the LMS Latin Summer School last week, somebody asked me what I thought of the Amazonian Synod. I wish I had just replied "Exactly what Cardinal Mueller has said". He beautifully demonstrates the pompous redundancy and repetitiousness of this fatuous document, pointing out that if all the repetitions were eliminated, it would probabably be less than half its length. His destruction job reminds me of the elegant pamphlets, Church Literature Association, which the late Professor Eric Mascal used to write after painful events such as the publication of the Encyclicals and Resolutions of the Anglican Lambeth Conferences. Trained as a Mathematician and then as a Thomist, Mascall used his icy and razor-sharp analytical mind to expose the pompous and silly twaddle that, in such documents, passed as Theology.
Mueller cites the following from the Instrumentum laboris: "Furthermore, we can say that the Amazon ... or another indigenous or communal territory ... is not only an ubi ... but aso a quid ... thus territory is a theological place where faith is lived and also a particular source of God's revelation: epiphanic places where blah blah blah "(I hope Fr Zed will forgive my appropriation of his convenient formula).
Need I say more? So I won't. Not least because His Eminence has already clobbered all this crass and evil verbiage far better than I could.
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Cardinal Mueller has indeed eviscerated the hyperbergolianistical "Instrumentum laboris", but Archbishop Viganò (speaking from an undisclosed location because of the Bergoglian Mafia) has provided a useful summary of the working document in an interview with Dr. Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican.
“The figure of Christ is absent,” he noted. “The Synod working document testifies to the emergence of a post-Christian Catholic theology, now, in this moment."
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me: I cannot attain unto it.
When I was a boy at a rather low Anglican Church, a visiting cleric came and delivered a sermon explaining his theory of the Eucharist. It was a very exciting sermon (at least I found it so). Except that I was somehow unable to recall the specific points that the cleric had made. It was my first introduction to verbosity.
My possession of a degree from the university qualifies me to pursue further study of the subjects without supervision - so, no Masters degree in Christian Theology for me, thanks. For several years now I have benefited enormously from the book suggestions on this blog. (my other main source of suggestions for further reading is the bibliographies in Aidan Nichols's books) But of course it's all a bit unsystematic.
Could we ever hope that a "Fr H Reading List" would be compiled?
@william arthurs: for a theology which places Christ at the center instead of the Amazon, the best recent book in my opinion would be "The Incarnate Lord : a Thomistic Study in Christology" by Thomas Joseph White, O.P., published by Catholic University of America Press in 2017.
The back jacket rightly states: "If Jesus is Son of God incarnate, as Christians usually claim, inescapable metaphysical questions arise, running from the relationship of human to divine nature in this particular case through to the significance of created reality as such in the light of the Trinity, questions quite often evaded even by committed believers. In these robustly conducted reflections, Thomas Joseph White convincingly demonstrates, in conversation with theologians of our own day, the radical challenge that Thomas Aquinas continues to make to the debate - a wonderful book!"
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