This is the text of the talk I gave at the 2025 Saint Benedict Center Conference in October.
“MAY you live in interesting times!” So goes an ancient and proverbial Chinese curse, short and pithy, but packed with enigmatic Asiatic irony and paradox. Perhaps the most ironic and paradoxical thing about this ancient Chinese curse is that it originates in the correspondences of a prominent 19th-Century British diplomatic family, who either mistakenly or falsely attributed it to the Chinese.
Interesting, isn’t it?
Perhaps the “ancient Chinese” reference was only dry British humor: dry, like James Bond’s iconic Vesper martinis, shaken not stirred.
The expression does have a certain allure. While “interesting” can mean intellectually stimulating or emotionally evocative, it can also imply an uneasy entrance into the terra incognita of change — the kind of change that our mentor, Brother Francis, said makes this life a vale of tears. Political unrest, geopolitical insecurity, economic turbulence, and epochal upheaval brought on by one revolution or another: these are the things that make for “interesting times.” Hic sunt leones, the medieval cartographers wrote on maps: “Here are lions.”
Our present ecclesiastical atmosphere of confusion and disarray certainly do make for interesting times in the Church — in this euphemistic sense of unrest, turbulence, upheaval, and revolution. We even have a leo — a lion — on the throne of Peter. Which brings me to my subject.
This talk — entitled, “A Modern Commonitory: St. Vincent of Lérins’ Certitude as a Remedy to Our Modern Confusion” — is my effort at helping us all comport ourselves with serene Christian virtue and inflexible Catholic fidelity during these “interesting times” in which we find ourselves. I am approaching our modern quandary under one and only one formality: its doctrinal and moral confusion.
We begin with a brief biographical sketch of the Father of the Church whose certitude I am proposing as a remedy to these ills.
His Life
Saint Vincent of Lérins (d. c. 445) was a Gaulish monk of the famous Abbey of Lérins, on the second largest of the Lérins islands — the Île Saint-Honorat — about a mile offshore of the French Riviera city of Cannes (famous today for its film festival). I would call him “French,” but, as the Germanic Franks had not yet migrated to that part of the world, the word would be anachronistic. The island gets its name from Saint Honoratus, who, along with Saint Caprasius, founded a monastery there around the year 410. While scholarly opinion is divided on the subject, some say that Saint Patrick was formed there as a monk after his escape from slavery in Ireland and before becoming that great nation’s apostle. At any rate, with or without Erin’s Apostle, the monastery produced numerous saints.
About Saint Vincent’s early life, we know very little. He had a secular career, perhaps a military one, before entering the monastery as what we would call today a “late vocation.”
The Commonitory
His most famous work — the one that interests us here — is the Commonitorium (Anglicized as “Commonitory”), which dates from around the year 434. Commonitorium means, roughly, “aid to memory,” and he wrote it, as he said, “to aid my memory, or, rather, to check my forgetfulness.” Specifically, his purpose was to aid his memory concerning the rule of faith for Catholics; that is, he set about “to describe what our ancestors have handed down and entrusted to us” and to put down how — as he expressed it — “I might be able to discern the truth of the Catholic faith from the falsity of heretical corruption.” (All quotations herein from the Commonitorium are from the excellent Os Justi Press edition, available here: Commonitory for the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith.)
His work was lost for a millennium and was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, when it became very useful to Counter-Reformation apologists like Saint Robert Bellarmine, the great Jesuit Doctor of the Church, who called the Commonitory “a golden book.” It is easy to see why this golden book was so useful for Catholics at that time; for, among other good reasons, sola scriptura, the Protestant heresy that Holy Scripture is the sole, exclusive rule of faith, takes a devastating beating in it; and this beating took place more than a thousand years before Luther and company even thought of spewing forth that wicked heresy. Later, in the Nineteenth Century, Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman would cite Saint Vincent multiple times in what is possibly his best known work: the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The intrepid Abbot of Solemnes, Dom Prosper Guéranger, also referenced the Lerinian monk multiple times in his magisterial Liturgical Year, and explicitly cited the “Vincentian Canon” — which we will speak of later — as a fixed rule of Catholic orthodoxy, just as Newman did.
The Commonitorium not an Anti-Augustinian Polemic
It has been claimed that the Commonitory was an Anti-Augustinan Polemic because, being part of the broader ecclesial life of Southern Gaul, and sharing its common currents of theological thought, Saint Vincent was a Semi-Pelagian and Saint Augustine was the implacable foe, not only of the original Pelagian heresy, but if its later, “Semi-Pelagian” permutation, which was not quite as bad. According to Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino,
The seventeenth-century Dutch humanist Gerardus Vossius was the first to insist that Vincent’s Commonitorium was a masked attack on Augustine. And this charge has been repeated by numerous scholars over the centuries, including the influential historian Adolf von Harnack. [This comes from an article in First Things Magazine, “Was St. Vincent of Lérins Anti-Augustinian?”]
What is the basis for this claim that pits one Father of the Church against another? Again, Msgr. Guarino:
Prosper of Aquitaine, a disciple of Augustine’s thought, wrote to the bishop of Hippo in a.d. 428, noting that the clergy of Marseilles and southern Gaul (where Vincent’s monastery of Lérins was located) believed that Augustine’s teaching on predestination rendered human effort meaningless and injected the concept of “fate” into the life of the Church. Further, according to the Gaulish monks, we first receive God’s grace through our natural ability, that is, by our asking, seeking, and knocking, as the Gospel countenances. The beginning of salvation is thereby located in the human being rather than in God’s unmerited grace. While outlining his argument, Prosper refers to a document called Objectiones Vincentianae (Vincentian Objections), thereby placing the monk of Lérins at the center of the controversy and, indeed, portraying him as Augustine’s chief opponent.
Given Prosper’s comments, later scholars started to comb Vincent’s work, hoping to discover evidence of his opposition to Augustine.
The work called by Saint Prosper of Aquitaine, Objectiones Vincentianae, may or may not have been authored by our Saint Vincent. It could have been by another man of the same name. Even if it were the product of our subject, the fact that he had a theological controversy with a great Bishop of his day does not mean that a work that has a clear scope and which names many names — notably, Tertullian and Origin, but many others besides — must somehow be a masked polemic against Saint Augustine. (As an aside, we should not be scandalized that one Father or one Saint would have a polemic against another. It happened in Church history, and such polemics often benefited the Church. Don’t forget that Saint Jerome once called Saint Augustine a “Numidian Ant” — which insult from the great Dalmatian curmudgeon at least has comical value for the Church!)
I make mention of this gratuitous supposition of the Commonitory as an anti-Augustinan polemic here because, if my listeners consult the Catholic Encyclopedia to learn more about Saint Vincent, you will find it there, and in other places as well. But the consensus in favor of this view began to fade from scholarly circles in the 1940’s, as Msgr. Guarino notes, with the publication of a florillegium of passages on the Trinity and the Incarnation compiled by Saint Vincent of Lérins. The passages were culled from the works of none other than Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose trinitarian thought, it turns out, was enthusiastically admired by the Lerinian monk.
Regarding the charge of his being a Semi-Pelagian, it is true that Saint Vincent and many other prominent ecclesiastics and monastic writers of southern Gaul shared that error. The great monastic writer Cassian comes to mind, whose works were prescribed as mandatory reading by Saint Benedict himself in his Rule for monks. But both truth and justice compel me to state clearly that, in both Saint Vincent’s and Cassian’s cases — and this is very important — Semi-Pelagianism had not yet been condemned by the Church. That wouldn’t happen until well after our holy Gaulish monks were under the old sod, in AD 531. That was when Pope Boniface II — the first Germanic pope, by the way — approved the acts of the Second Council of Orange, which took place in 529. This regional synod, presided over by Saint Cæsarius of Arles, did much to advance the Church’s teaching on grace, and the teachings of the Second Council of Orange were definitively extended to the whole Church by the Roman Pontiff.
The Vincentian Canon
Now, let’s get back to the contents of the Commonitorium. In his pursuit of the goal of distinguishing heretical corruption from Catholic truth, Saint Vincent lays down some sagacious principles, one of which he received — as he wrote — “from many men, outstanding in sanctity and doctrinal knowledge,” namely, “to fortify that faith in a twofold manner: first, by the authority of the divine Law [Holy Scripture]; second, by the tradition of the Catholic Church.” Because the inspired Scriptures admit of many interpretations — “so that one may almost gain the impression that it can yield as many different meanings as there are men” — our Saint gives us his key to understanding them, neatly expressed in a dictum that has come to be known as “the Vincentian Canon”:
In the Catholic Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est). This is truly and properly ‘Catholic,’ as indicated by the force and etymology of the name itself, which comprises everything truly universal. This general rule will be truly applied if we follow the principles of universality, antiquity, and consent. [Note that the words, “universality, antiquity and consent” are merely a rhetorical restating of “everywhere, always, and by all.” Like Saint Augustine, Saint Vincent of Lérins is an accomplished master of rhetoric.]
The Vincentian Canon articulates the fundamentally “conservative” and “traditional” element of the theology of Saint Vincent of Lérins. For page after page, the author goes through examples of how this rule has been applied, using, among other things, the modus operandi of ecumenical councils — especially Nicea and Ephesus (the latter of which ended roughly three years before Saint Vincent wrote) — and how this appeal to universality, antiquity, and consent has been utilized by popes and bishops in their teaching.
Here is a little florilegium of passages from the book:
- From Chapter 6: “It has been an established custom in the Church that the more devout a person is, the more prompt he is to oppose innovations.” (p. 21)
- Same chapter: Speaking of Pope St. Stephen’s handling of the great “rebaptism” controversy in the African church, he writes, “He apparently considered it fitting to surpass all others in his devotion to the faith, inasmuch as he was superior to them by virtue of his office. In an epistle, which he thereupon sent to Africa, he stated it as a rule that ‘nothing new is to be accepted; only what has been handed down by tradition.’” (p. 23)
- From Chapter 7: “We should, therefore, dread with a great fear the sacrilege of changing faith and profaning religion. We should be deterred from such a sin not only by the disciple of ecclesiastical rule, but also by the censure of apostolic authority.” (p. 27)
- Quoting a famous passage from St. Paul to the Galatians (1:8), he writes: “Even if ‘an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.’ For the preservation of the traditional faith, it was not sufficient for him to look only on the condition of human nature; he also included the eminent angelic nature. ‘Though we,’ he says, ‘or an angel from heaven.’ Not that he thinks the holy and celestial angels could sin. What he really means is: If that happened which cannot happen, let whosoever may attempt to change the traditional faith be anathema.” (p. 31)
- From Chapter 9: “Consequently, to announce to Catholic Christians a doctrine other than that which they have received was never permitted, is nowhere permitted, and never will be permitted. It was ever necessary, is everywhere necessary, and ever will be necessary that those who announce a doctrine other than that which was received once and for all be anathema.” (p. 33)
- Chapter 20: “…a true and genuine Catholic is the man who loves the Truth of God, the Church, and the Body of Christ (Eph. 1:23); who does not put anything above divine religion and the Catholic faith — neither the authority, nor the affection, nor the genius, nor the eloquence, nor the philosophy of any other human being. He despises all that and, being firmly founded in the faith, is determined to hold and believe nothing but what the Catholic Church, as he has perceived, has held universally and from ancient times.” (p.71)
- Here is a long passage:
I cannot help wondering about such madness in certain people, the dreadful impiety of their blinded minds, their insatiable lust for error that they are not content with the traditional rule of faith as once and for all received from antiquity, but are driven to seek another novelty daily. They are possessed by a permanent desire to change religion, to add something and to take something away — as though the dogma were not divine, so that it has to be revealed only once. But they take it for a merely human institution, which cannot be perfected except by constant emendations, nay rather, by constant corrections. Yet the divine prophecies say: “Pass not beyond the ancient bounds which thy fathers have set” (Prov. 22:28) and “Judge not against a judge” (Eccl. 8:17) and “he that breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall bite him” (Eccl. 10:8). And we have this word of the Apostle that like a spiritual sword has often slaughtered and will forever slaughter all the vicious novelties of all the heretics: “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called, which some promising have erred concerning the faith” (I Tim. 6:20-21).
Are there really people who can listen to such adjurations and then remain in such hardened and shameless stubbornness, such stony impudence, such adamant obstinacy, as not to yield to the mighty weight of these divine words and to weaken under such a load, as not to be shattered by these hammer strokes, as not to be crushed by such powerful thunderbolts? “Avoiding,” he says, “profane novelties of words.” He did not say “antiquities” or “the old traditions.” No, he clearly shows the positive implications of this negative statement: Novelty is to be avoided, hence antiquity has to be respected; novelty is profane, hence, the old tradition is sacred. “And,” he continues, “the oppositions of knowledge falsely so called.” A misnomer indeed for the doctrines of the heretics — ignorance beautified by the name of knowledge, darkness by that of clarity, night by that of light! “Which some promising have erred concerning the faith.” What did they promise and in what did they err, if not in regard to a hitherto unknown doctrine?
- Among his citations from the popes, this one from Pope Saint Sixtus III, cited in Chapter 32, stands out as irresistible: “Let no further advance of novelty be permitted, because it is unbecoming to add anything to ancient tradition; the transparent faith and belief of our forefathers should not be soiled by contact with dirt.”
‘Exceedingly Great Progress’
Because the Vincentian Canon is a conservative principle that enshrines tradition in its proper place, it is anathema to liberals and progressivists, who are all about evolution of dogma — of the sort condemned explicitly by Pope Saint Pius X in Lamentabili Sane, the Syllabus of Errors condemning the Modernist novelties. However, the Lérinian monk was not opposed to the notion of true progress, and it is on this point that he was cited by Vatican I, by Pope Saint Pius X, and by other popes. Chapter 23 of the Commonitory begins with a query: “At this point, the question may be asked: If this is right, then is no progress of religion possible within the Church of Christ?” His answer deserves to be cited at length:
To be sure, there has to be progress, even exceedingly great progress. For who is so grudging toward his fellow men and so full of hatred toward God as to try to prohibit it? But it must be progress in the proper sense of the word, and not a change in faith. Progress means that each thing grows within itself, whereas change implies that one thing is transformed into another. [An interruption here: This section that follows was famously quoted by Vatican Council I at the end of Dei Filius — Vatican I’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith.”] Hence, it must be that understanding, knowledge, and wisdom grow and advance mightily and strongly in individuals as well as in the community, in a single person as well as in the Church as a whole, and this gradually according to age and history. But they must progress within their own limits, that is, in accordance with the same dogma, the same meaning, and the same judgment.
This notion of progress is explained in the Commonitorium as like that of a living thing — a tree or a man — which grows and develops while remaining the identical living thing it always was. In other words, it is the simple growth of a vital, flourishing, healthy organism, not a sort of Darwinian evolution of one species into another. The real Catholic phenomenon is “doctrinal development,” not “dogmatic Darwinism” — the latter of which we see a great deal of in our day: witness the contorted apologetics in the name of “development of doctrine” being done to justify recent papal statements on capital punishment and serial adulterers receiving Holy Communion without repentance.
Speaking of which: Some of my readers may recall that Pope Francis liked to quote Saint Vincent of Lérins on doctrinal progress. My own reaction to the late pontiff’s very selective use of the great Gaulish father was articulately put by the already mentioned Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino in another article in the pages of First Things: “Pope Francis and St. Vincent of Lérins.” Noting that Pope Francis frequently cited Saint Vincent to the effect that Christian doctrine is “consolidated by years, enlarged by time, [and] refined by age,” Msgr. Guarino says, “The pope is surely correct that this is a crucial phrase. But if I were to counsel the pope, I would encourage him to take account of St. Vincent’s entire Commonitorium, not simply the one selection he cites repeatedly.” The Monsignor continues,
Note that St. Vincent never speaks positively about reversals. A reversal, for Vincent, is not an advance in the Church’s understanding of truth; it is not an instance of a teaching “enlarged by time.” On the contrary, reversals are the hallmarks of heretics. … When condemning reversals, Vincent is always talking about the attempt to reverse or alter the solemn teachings of ecumenical councils. The Lerinian is particularly haunted by attempts to reverse the teaching of Nicaea, such as happened at the Council of Ariminum (Rimini, a.d. 359), which, in its proposed creed, dropped the crucial word, homoousios [i.e., consubstantial].
I would also invite Pope Francis to invoke the salutary guardrails Vincent erects for the sake of ensuring proper development. While Pope Francis is taken with Vincent’s phrase dilatetur tempore (“enlarged by time”), the Lerinian also uses the suggestive phrase res amplificetur in se (“the thing grows within itself”). The Lerinian argues that there are two kinds of change: A legitimate change, a profectus, is an advance — homogeneous growth over time — such as a child becoming an adult. An improper change is a pernicious deformation, called a permutatio. This is a change in someone’s or something’s very essence, such as a rosebush becoming mere thorns and thistles.
Further on, the good Monsignor writes:
Another guardrail is the Vincentian claim that growth and change must be in eodem sensu eademque sententia, that is, according to the same meaning and the same judgment. For the monk of Lérins, any growth or development over time must preserve the substantive meaning of earlier teachings. For example, the Church can certainly grow in its understanding of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ, but it can never backtrack on the definition of Nicaea. The idem sensus or “same meaning” must always be maintained in any future development.
With these principles laid down, Msgr. Guarino leads us to the conclusion that Pope Francis’ teaching on capital punishment represents not a progress but a reversal of perennial Catholic doctrine, something Saint Vincent expressly condemns in the Commonitory — and he does so, I might add, in stern, persuasive, and very eloquent language.
It is this sage advice on doctrinal progress that led Saint John Henry Newman to cite the Lerinian in his above-mentioned Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which sets out to distinguish between true and false doctrinal development. There exists, by the way, a letter by Pope Saint Pius X to Bishop Edward Thomas O’Dwyer, the Ordinary of Limerick, Ireland, on the writings of Cardinal Newman. Saint Pius X commends an essay written by Bishop O’Dwyer, “in which” — Pius wrote — “you show that the writings of Cardinal Newman, far from being in disagreement with Our Encyclical Letter Pascendi, are very much in harmony with it.” The anti-Modernist pope goes on: “if in the things he had written before his profession of the Catholic faith one can justly detect something which may have a kind of similarity with certain Modernist formulas, you are correct in saying that this is not relevant to his later works.” And further, “nothing can be found to bring any suspicion about his faith.” He — again, Pope St. Pius X — commends Bishop O’Dwyer for exposing the fraud of the Modernists who were claiming the prestige of Cardinal Newman to advance their cause.
Ordinary Magisterium vs. ‘A Teacher Established in the Church,’ Who Errs
In Chapter ten of the Commonitory, Saint Vincent considers what we should do when what he calls “a teacher established in the Church” errs against the Faith in some opinion he teaches. I would like to read to you the entirety of that brief chapter, but, for my purposes, I must first establish a foundation that will update the concepts he covers in it with a more developed theological lexicon. This will entail only a few moments’ tangent to consider the notion of “the ordinary magisterium.”
The distinction between magisterium ordinarium and magisterium extraordinarium (ordinary and extraordinary Magisterium) was first made in the Nineteenth Century. While there has long been an ambiguity in the term “ordinary magisterium,” its great champion in that century, one whose teaching very much informed the interventions of Bl. Pope Pius IX and, later, the documents of Vatican I, was the German Jesuit theologian, Father Joseph Kleutgen. Here is how Dr. John Joy, a contemporary American theologian, explains Kleutgen’s view of the magisterium ordinarium:
[I]t is primarily based on the distinction between the explicitly documented teaching of the Church (whether pope or bishops, whether gathered in council or dispersed throughout the world) and the implicit or undocumented teaching of the Church — that is, the teaching of the Church not found in the documents of the hierarchical magisterium, but rather in Scripture, in the liturgy, in the fathers and doctors of the Church, in the consensus of the faithful, etc.
According to Kletugen, the Church exercises a twofold magisterium: ordinary and extraordinary. The extraordinary magisterium is the judging office… of the Church. It is exercised in the act of defining or declaring the doctrine of the Church. He makes no essential distinction in this regard between judgments, definitions, declarations, determinations, or decisions of the Church. These various terms are for him merely so many ways of expressing the definitive or irrevocable nature of the Church’s judgments. The distinguishing feature of the extraordinary as compared to the ordinary magisterium lies in the explicitness of these judgments: they are visibly and tangibly enshrined in the public documents of the Church. (Joy, pp. 79-80)
Later, Dr. Joy further summarizes Kleutgen’s concept of the ordinary magisterium (I’m going to skip over the German terms that Joy cites from Father Kleutgen in respect to my German ancestors, whose language I will certainly mangle):
The ordinary magisterium is identified with the living tradition of the Church, the constant and perpetual process of handing down the faith received from the apostles. This teaching office [German] of the Church is described as the ‘ordinary and perpetual’ [German], the ‘constant and ordinary’ [German], and the ‘usual’ magisterium of the Church. The distinguishing feature of the ordinary magisterium by contrast with the extraordinary magisterium, lies in its intangibility — its teaching is something upon which one cannot directly put one’s finger. The teaching of the ordinary magisterium is that teaching of the Church that is not formulated in the documents of the Church. The teaching of this father or of that father, of this bishop or that bishop, of this or that doctor, may indeed be tangible and explicit; but only through the unanimity of their teaching are we able to recognize the common teaching of the Church. (Joy, p. 81)
Now, it is true that the term “ordinary magisterium” itself developed over time, and the warnings of some of the Fathers at Vatican I proved prophetic; namely, that the term was too ambiguous and therefore lent itself to confusion. Nonetheless, the Council used it. As it later evolved in the first half of the Twentieth Century, the term “ordinary magisterium” came to include written magisterial interventions that did not rise to the level of extraordinary judgments of the Pope or the Bishops. Vatican II, interestingly and I might say wisely — and that, without any irony — avoided the term, and instead opted for “authentic magisterium,” which, when clearly understood as “merely authentic” and not extraordinary, is not per se infallible. I don’t have the leisure here to develop all these distinctions, but in Father Kleutgen’s original distinction, the ordinary magisterium was considered infallible. And why? Because it was the expression of what was always taught by the Ecclesia docens (the teaching Church) and believed by the Ecclesia discens (the learning Church). This “intangible” doctrine transmitted through the daily teaching of the hierarchy and the living of the faith is what we find when we look — and I quote Dr. Joy again — “to Scripture first of all, and then to the fathers and doctors of the Church and other eminent ecclesiastical writers, to the monuments of antiquity, to the customs, laws, and liturgies of the Church…” (p. 82). This older concept of ordinary magisterium is conceptually indistinguishable from the Vincentian Canon. In other words: it is Tradition!
It was this concept that Vatican I called “the ordinary and universal” magisterium. And again, in this conception, the ordinary magisterium is unambiguously infallible.
With this understanding of the infallible ordinary magisterium under our belts, permit me to read the entirety of Chapter Ten of the Commonitory so that we can understand that sometimes the “merely authentic” — i.e., non-infallible — magisterium of this or that pope, this or that Roman dicastery, episcopal conference, or even this or that council can be assessed (very carefully, mind you!) in light of a higher, more deeply rooted, and more constant principle.
There are some who will say: Why, then, does Divine Providence often permit eminent persons, who are well established in the Church, to announce novel ideas to Catholics?
This is a good and earnest question, and should be thoroughly and extensively discussed. To do so satisfactorily, we have to refer not to our own ingenuity, but to the authority of divine Law and to the basic documents of ecclesiastical teaching. Let us listen, therefore, to blessed Moses. He himself may teach us why learned men and those who, because of their mysterious gifts, are called Prophets by the Apostles, sometimes are permitted to advance new dogmas. These are customarily called “strange gods” in the Old Testament, in accordance with its allegorical pattern of speech (and a very good term, incidentally, since the heretics have the same reverence for their own opinions as the Gentiles for their gods). Blessed Moses has this to say in Deuteronomy: “If there rise in the midst of thee a prophet or one that saith he hath dreamed a dream,” that is, a doctor of the Church who, in the opinion of his disciples or listeners, is teaching by some revelation — well, what then? Moses continues: “and he foretell a sign and a wonder: and that come to pass which he spoke…” Evidently, he has some outstanding master of great knowledge in mind, one who, in the eyes of his followers, is not only familiar with human affairs but also capable of a foreknowledge of transcendent matters — a master such as Valentine, Donatus, Photinus, Apollinaris, and the rest of them appeared to be in the opinion of their boasting disciples — well, and what then? “And he say to thee: Let us go and follow strange gods, which thou knowest not, and let us serve them…” (And who are the “strange gods,” if not strange errors?) “Which thou knowest not,” that is, novel and unheared-of ones. “And let us serve them,” that is, let us have faith in them; let us follow them. And now, what is Moses’ conclusion? “Thou shalt not hear the words of that prophet or dreamer,” he says. And why, I ask you, does God not forbid to be taught what he forbids to be listened to? “For the Lord your God trieth you, that it may appear whether you love Him with all your heart, and with all your soul” (Deut. 13:1
Clearer than daylight is the reason why Divine Providence sometimes suffers certain doctors of the Church to preach new dogmas: to the effect that “the Lord your God trieth you.” And great is the temptation indeed when that man whom you look upon as a prophet, as a disciple of prophets, as a doctor and a defender of truth, whom you have embraced with highest veneration and love, suddenly and surreptitiously introduces noxious errors which you are unable to detect quickly so long as you still are under the spell of his former teaching, and which you do not dare to condemn easily so long as the affection for your old teacher hinders you from so doing.
Now, St. Vincent does not himself apply this thinking to popes or councils, but he did apply it to celebrated teachers and bishops like Origen, Tertullian, Nestorius, Apollinaris, Photinus, and even Saint Cyprian of Carthage, the great African bishop-martyr, who erred on the contentious issue of the “rebaptism” of heretics, and clashed with Pope St. Stephen in the matter. About this, the Lerinian writes, “On the other hand, what some saint, learned man, bishop, confessor, or martyr has individually thought outside of, or even contrary to, the general opinion, must be considered his personal, particular, and quite private opinion, entirely removed from the common, public, and general opinion.” (p. 105) He points out that there were heretics and schismatics who took such opinions with them straight out of the Church. But not all who went against the grain of what would later be called the infallible ordinary magisterium were subjectively or really schismatics or heretics. We have saints who fit this description. And so, without attempting to judge the interior forum of the clergy, I very much believe that we can apply Saint Vincent’s thinking to the novelties assailing us for several decades now from popes and bishops. We already saw Msgr. Guarino do it with Pope Francis in the case of capital punishment. It is my personal belief — confirmed in at least one approved private revelation (that of Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser) — that a future ecumenical council will do just that in assessing and authoritatively correcting the dystopian regime of novelty the Church has been suffering under for decades now.
Those with an exaggerated view of papal infallibility would no doubt have a problem with my reasoning here, so let me put the case as strongly as possible: We need to recall that St. Vincent held up episcopal teaching to his critique in chapter ten: four of the six men I named above were bishops: Nestorius, Apollinaris, Photinus, and Saint Cyprian of Carthage; the other two, Origen and Tertullian, were priests. But the bishops themselves hold a prophetical office in the Church and are her official teachers — her magistrī — so to apply the Lerinian logic to the head of the college of bishops, the pope, is not an unreasonable stretch, not unless one wants to pretend that the pope is always and everywhere infallible, which is nothing but a Protestant caricature of papal infallibility.
Whether one is satisfied with the answer Saint Vincent of Lérins gives as to why God permits a teacher established in the Church to teach error is a legitimate question. He says it is to try our charity, that is, our love for God: “[F]or the Lord your God trieth you, that it may appear whether you love him with all your heart, and with all your soul, or not” (Deut. 13:3). Personally, I find this allegorical reading of the Old Testament not only satisfying, but compelling. The Catholic Church is not now nor has she ever been a cult of personality, and much of the devotion to popes in modern times — one might argue since the 19th Century — has taken on the character of a personality cult. Now, I might qualify my statement and say that the Catholic Church is not a cult of personality, unless we are speaking of the Persons of the holy and undivided Trinity, whom we are to love in an unmeasured way: with our whole heart, soul, strength, and mind. Saint Vincent occupies himself in the Commonitory with distinguishing what is divine from what is merely human, and it is the divine dogma we are to embrace and thereby love God as we ought. That expression, “divine dogma” is not mine, by the way, but Saint Vincent’s: In chapter twenty-two of the Commonitory, he speaks of pretiosas divi dogmatis gemmas — “the precious gems of divine dogma.”
Think about it. The Gospel commands us to love God with all our mind. How do we do that? This implies a radical commitment to the truth: to thinking rightly about God, about ourselves, about life’s existential questions, and all matters of virtue and vice in the light of God. This is a comprehensive program for seeing reality and acting upon it in accordance with a Faith that is vivified by Charity. The Greek word translated “mind” here in the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke is διάνοια, which connotes the mind as understanding, as actively thinking or reasoning discursively. It implies deep thought, critical thinking, and moral judgment. In other words, we have to love God in our deepest thoughts, which means, as much as possible, to make His thoughts ours and align our judgment with His, and for that, we have to be faithful to what He gave the Church in the depositum fidei: the sacred deposit of the faith. For that reason, if someone in the Church, even a teacher established in the Church — even a bishop, a pope, or a group of bishops assembled in synod — contradicts that sacred deposit or waters it down, then we have to love God enough not to accept that contrary doctrine, but must, instead, hold fast to the perennial and true doctrine witnessed by the Church ubique, semper, et ab omnibus — that is, with “universality, antiquity, and consent.” This is the love that demands of us what the Apostle wrote when he said, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema!”
This uncompromising love that does not tolerate a false gospel brings to mind a beautiful passage from the writings of that great 19th-Century French priest and religious, Ven. Emmanuel d’Alzon, the founder of the Augustinians of the Assumption:
We love Christ with the same kind of love as did the early Christians, because he still faces the same enemies he faced then. We love him with the love that made the Apostle say, ‘If anyone does not love Jesus Christ, let him be cursed’ (1 Cor. 16:22). This may not be very tolerant, but you know that those who love much tolerate little. Properly speaking, true love is revealed in the power of a noble and frank intolerance. In these days, with no energy left for either love or hate, men do not see that their tolerance is just another form of weakness. We are intolerant, because we draw our strength from our love of Jesus Christ.
Applying It to Our Crusade
Here at Saint Benedict Center, we accept Saint Vincent’s true Catholic notion of “progress” and doctrinal development — a homogeneous development of doctrine which retains the sense of all the ancient dogmas, but adds to them greater clarity and understanding. Centuries of ecumenical councils and papal teachings, aided by the hard work of holy doctors and approved theologians, have accomplished just this under the gentle influence of the Holy Ghost. With the Church, we at Saint Benedict Center reject the heterogeneous development of doctrine, condemned by Pope St. Pius X as the “evolution of dogma.”
The particular hill we are willing to die on, as everybody knows, is extra ecclesiam nulla salus — but, to be sure, while this particular dogma is our raison d’être, we would hope to die for any one of the Church’s teachings on faith or morals! Given what we have learned from Saint Vincent about dogmatic “reversals” not being permitted, outside cannot mean inside, and no salvation cannot mean salvation! In other words, Yes cannot mean No or vice versa. We are against dogmatic Darwinism!
The principles laid down by Saint Vincent of Lérins have guided Popes, Ecumenical Councils, Bishops, Doctors of the Church, and excellent theologians since their providential rediscovery in the sixteenth century, at a time when the Church had special need of them. She still has this need, so we should study the Commonitory now and apply its sound principles to our situation today inasmuch as they do apply to it. While we are at it, we should also pray to this great saint, whose feast is on May 24, providentially, the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians. May he and She both aid us in maintaining our Catholic certitude as a remedy to the confusion of these interesting times in which we live!
For the Os Justi Press edition of the Commonitory, go here: Commonitory for the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith.
