How do we navigate the turbulent waters of twenty-first century Catholicism?
We see many good things in the Church today, to be sure, but we also see massive blow-back against them from a dying generation of neo-modernist clerics in high places who hate Catholic tradition. We also see a lot of confusion — and that is something that the devil loves, because confusion can make people weary even of thinking that the truth itself is knowable.
Voices from the past, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, can help us navigate that confusion. We have “so great a cloud of witnesses over our head” (Heb. 12:1) to help us see. It is one of these witnesses that I wish to write about here.
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 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.” 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 “I might be able to discern the truth of the Catholic faith from the falsity of heretical corruption.”
His work was lost for a millennium and was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, when it became quite useful to Counter-Reformation apologists like Saint Robert Bellarmine (who called it “a golden book”). It is easy to see why the Commonitory was so useful for Catholics at that time; for, among other good reasons, sola scriptura takes a devastating beating in it — and this more than a thousand years before Luther and company even thought of spewing forth that wicked heresy. Later, Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman cites Saint Vincent multiple times in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The intrepid Abbot of Solemnes, Dom Prosper Guéranger, also cites the Lerinian monk multiple times in his magisterial Liturgical Year, and explicitly cites the “Vincentian Canon” (see below) as a fixed rule of Catholic orthodoxy, as does Newman.
In his pursuit of distinguishing heretical corruption from Catholic truth, Saint Vincent lays down some sagacious principles, one of which he received “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” — he gives us his key to understanding them, 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.
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. Among his quotes from the popes, this one from Pope Saint Sixtus III, cited in Chapter 32, stands out in my mind: “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.”
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 by Pope Saint Pius X. 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 his work begins with a question: “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 quoted 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. 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. [The section in bold is what Vatican Council I quoted at the end of Dei Filius.]
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 Holy Father’s very selective use of the great Gaulish father was very articulately put by Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino in the pages of First Things. 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.” He 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 [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 harsh, insistent, and eloquent language.
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, 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 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 “reversals,” outside cannot mean inside, and no salvation cannot mean salvation! In other words, Yes cannot mean No or vice versa.
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 we should 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 safely navigating the turbulent waters of the twenty-first Century!
