How The "Theology Of Ambiguity"…
Has Undermined Post-Conciliar Catechesis

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a tidal wave of theological error — and even heresy — has struck the Catholic Church with disastrous effects on catechetics, the Church's main instrument for "handing on the Faith which comes to us from the Apostles."

As Pope John Paul II explained in one of his first encyclicals setting forth his priorities as Supreme Pontiff, catechetics is:

"the name… given to the whole of the efforts within the Church to make disciples, to help people believe that Jesus is the Son of God, so that believing they may have life in His name (cf. John 20:31), and to educate and instruct them in this life and thus build up the Body of Christ."

A "Theology of Ambiguity" that has been spread by dissenter and heterodox theologians seeking to establish themselves as a "para-magisterium" in the Church (and seeking parity with the official rulers of the Church, the Pope and bishops) has resulted in effectively obscuring for millions of Catholic people the integrity and clarity of the Church's dogmatic and moral teachings. The present confusion evident among millions of American Catholics, their religious ignorance, and the defections of millions (priests, religious, and laity) from practice of the Faith or even to abandoning the Church itself have become staple commentary in both the secular and Catholic press.

It is not that recent Popes as chief pastors of the Church failed to alert the faithful to the evidence of an alarming revival of the theological modernism that had been prophetically condemned by St. Pius X at the turn of the century. Pope Pius XII had issued his encyclical "Humani Generis" warning against theological speculations evacuating the Catholic Faith of its substance.

To counteract the destructive errors of the "Dutch Catechism" being spread throughout the Catholic world after Vatican II by a mass media entranced by theological novelties, Pope Paul VI issued his "Credo of the People of God". In many addresses he identified a "Crisis of Faith" troubling the faithful of the Church and called upon bishops to defend the Faith as in a famous 1967 address on "Heroes of the Faith: Peter and Paul," wherein he noted:

"While man's religious sense today is in a decline, depriving the faith of its natural foundation, new opinions in exegesis and theology often borrowed from bold but blind secular philosophies have in places found a way into the realm of Catholic teaching.

"They question or distort the objective sense of truths taught with authority by the Church; under the pretext of adapting religious thought to the contemporary outlook, they prescind from the guidance of the Church's teaching, give the foundations of theological speculation a historicist direction, dare to rob Holy Scripture's testimony of its sacred and historical character and try to introduce a so-called 'post-conciliar' mentality among the People of God. This neglects the solidity and consistency of the council's vast and magnificent development of teaching and legislation, neglects with it the Church's accumulated riches of thought and practice in order to overturn the spirit of traditional fidelity and spread about the illusion of giving Christianity a new interpretation, which is arbitrary and barren.

"What would remain of the content of our faith, or of the theological virtue that professes it, if these attempts, freed from the support of the Church's teaching authority, were destined to prevail?"

Such attempts cannot be said to have totally succeeded in the Church in the United States despite the dominance in Catholic universities and colleges of disobedient administrators and dissenting faculty whose influence has, in effect, paralyzed the U.S. bishops' implementation of Pope John Paul II's "Ex Corde Ecclesiae", intended to preserve the institutional identity of the Church's academic schools of higher education. Similarly, all the heterodox tendencies noted by Paul VI were also to be in evidence in the Church’s own seminary system where all too many professors of theology sought to "liberate" the teaching of Catholic Christianity from the restraints of Holy Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, and the Magisterium of Pope and Bishops.

The ineffectiveness of American bishops to re-establish hierarchical control over the Church's own theological, catechetical, and other educational institutions — including religious and liturgical instruction in parishes — has revealed another sorry consequence of the startling failure to heed Pope John Paul II's reiterated pleas throughout the years of his long pontificate to restore doctrinal order in the Church. The program for the indispensable renewal of catechetics he laid out in his remarkable 1979 Apostolic exhortation "Catechesi Tradendae" wherein he took the occasion to ask directly:

"What kind of catechesis would it be that failed to give their full place to man's creation and sin: to God's plan of redemption and its long, loving preparation and realization; to the Incarnation of the Son of God; to Mary, the Immaculate One, the Mother of God, ever Virgin, raised body and soul to the glory of Heaven, and to her role in the mystery of salvation; to the mystery of lawlessness at work in our lives and the power of God freeing us from it; to the need for penance and asceticism; to the sacramental and liturgical actions; to the reality of the Eucharistic Presence; to participation in divine life here and hereafter, and so on? Thus, no true catechist can lawfully, on his own initiative, make a selection of what he considers important in the Deposit of Faith as opposed to what he considers unimportant, so as to teach the one and reject the other".
(n. 30)

Like Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, the present Successor of Peter (Benedict XVI) has often urged bishops throughout the world to exercise their collegiality to vigorously join the Chief Pastor to defend the Faith being challenged by the "dictatorship of relativism" stemming from the false philosophical ideologies of our time and resulting in the "Theology of Ambiguity."

It must be noted that the dissent that has unhappily spread among American Catholics is largely due to the cunning and ambiguous language characterizing the often-contradictory religious output of dissenter theologians who:

1. directly deny or subtly question the existence of objective truth, thereby rendering all dogma unbelievable and the Creed irrelevant to "modern man" and "post-modern man";
2. keep an abject silence concerning major truths of the "Deposit of Faith" or in the manner of the dissenting advocates of "Cafeteria Catholicism" choose to outright reject key truths of the faith;
3. have substituted the erroneous philosophies of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Teilhard de Chardin, and Heidegger (not to mention such figures as Rousseau, Dewey, and the leading psychologists of the secular-humanist movement) for the traditional realism of the great Scholastic thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas (and exemplified in "common sense").

The result has been a lapse into a dangerous philosophical subjectivity elevating human consciousness, human freedom, and "lived experience" above the demands of truth itself. It is a falsified catechetics which presents the Catholic Faith in fragmented form. Emptied of its organic unity as safeguarded by the Magisterium — such "catechesis" only serves to expose the person to the follies of unchecked "religious experiences."

It was the rebellion against Humanae Vitae engaged in by many theologians and catechists and that has existed for over 40 years which opened the Pandora's Box of Dissent which now seriously menaces the visible Unity of the Church, threatening to give form to that "invisible schism" which credible writers acknowledge as existing and which they blame for the loss of moral credibility which the American hierarchy has suffered. The continued tolerance of doctrinal dissent promoted by neo-modernist theologians, catechists, and politicians (who have the itching ear of the public) is a far more serious problem for the Church than the clerical sexual scandals and liturgical abuses which attract the sensationalist press and disgust people in the pews.

For, it is the very identity of the Catholic Church which has been and is under attack. The present-day deconstructionists of Catholic faith and morals have not changed their spots since that July 12, 1968 editorial in Commonweal which revealed their opposition to Pope Paul VI's Credo of the People of God. That Credo constituted the Church's Profession of Faith reaffirming the age-old and immutable Faith of orthodox Christianity. Commonweal said:

"What [that] document mainly accomplishes is to underscore the great chasm between papal thinking and the forward movement of Catholic theology.

• There cannot be many Catholic biblical theologians left who would be willing to speak of an 'original offense' committed by someone called 'Adam.'
• There cannot be many sacramental theologians left who would say that the doctrine of the real presence is 'very appropriately called by the Church "transubstantiation".'
• There cannot be many liturgists around ready to glorify adoration of the 'Blessed Host.'
• There cannot be many ecclesiologists left who would give the biblical image of the Church as the 'Body of Christ' a primacy over other images.
• There cannot be many dogmatic theologians left who would care to speak of those who refuse God's love and pity as 'going to the fire that will not extinguish.'

"In sum, there cannot be many theologians left who would be able to assent to a message and a 'new Credo' whose content not only fails to reflect even Vatican II but even more fails to admit what has happened to theology since then. "To say all this is not to invoke over against the Pope an evanescent 'underground theology,' but rather the work of the most eminent, most 'qualified,' most duly established theologians… Where the Pope could be a reconciler, a center of unity, he turns out to be a major source of disunity. For in our day to use dead theological language, to obsessively dwell on 'dangers,' to ignore the actual state of theological development, to fail even to mention Vatican II, is to foster disunity. Can the Pope be reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church 1968? That question poses an ecumenical task worth pursuing."

The above is a masterpiece of neo-modernist arrogance, but it set forth for all to read that "Theology of Ambiguity" wherein "professional" American theologians (now "occupying" the Catholic Theological Society of America and active in supposedly Catholic universities such as Notre Dame, Creighton, and Georgetown) cleverly mask a blatant rejection of revealed truths of the supernatural order. Obviously rejoicing in the immunity of dissenter theologians from ecclesiastical discipline, the Commonweal editorial betrayed the schismatic and heretical tendencies contained in a spreading anti-Roman complex that was noted many years ago by theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

The reduction of revealed truth to the level of human experience (the very essence of neo-modernism) has been manifested in the aberrant but persistent attempt to deconstruct and explain away Articles of Faith considered incompatible with the "American religious experience."

 

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