Although Corpus Christi was — in keeping with Easter’s unusually early appearance in 2024 — on May 30 this year, it normally occurs in June. The Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi being the feast of the Sacred Heart, it is always in June, which accordingly is celebrated as the moth of the Sacred Heart. The first of July in the traditional calendar is the Feast of the Precious Blood, which in turn gives its title to July. These three devotions — the Holy Eucharist, Sacred Heart, and Precious Blood — are inextricably linked. To the outsider, they are fanciful things — yet to the Catholic, there is nothing more real.
While the idea of Transubstantiation is routinely dismissed as impossible, and the vision of various persons regarding the Sacred Heart dismissed just as routinely, the ever-increasing number of Eucharistic Miracles refute such dismissal in a powerful manner; in those cases where the species of bread turns to visible flesh, it is always heart flesh. The blood type of visibly appearing blood is always the same as that found on the shroud of Turin, the Sudarium of Oviedo, and various other relics. What these facts taken as whole in turn suggest is that the Catholic religion, based upon the belief in a God-turned-Man who died to help His people out of their Fallen State is literally true. If one wishes to save one’s soul, entrance into the Church that daily draws its Divine Lord onto its altars would seem a necessity.
But despite these facts, much of the hierarchy for over a century have wished unconsciously or otherwise to escape these realities. As is well known, Fr. Leonard Feeney’s career was destroyed over this issue, and calumnies continue to dog his memory and those who agree with him. But no less a figure than Pope Benedict XVI tackled the issue in an October 2015 interview with Fr. Jacques Servais, S.J. His Jesuit interlocutor asked a very important question: “In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola does not use the Old Testament images of revenge, as opposed to Paul (cfr. 2 Thessalonians 1: 5-9); nevertheless he invites us to contemplate how men, until the Incarnation, ‘descended into hell’ (Spiritual Exercises n. 102; see. ds iv, 376) and to consider the example of the ‘countless others who ended up there for far fewer sins than I have I committed’ (Spiritual Exercises, n. 52). It is in this spirit that St. Francis Xavier lived his pastoral work, convinced he had to try to save from the terrible fate of eternal damnation as many ‘infidels’ as possible. The teaching, formalized in the Council of Trent, in the passage with regard to the judgment of the good and the evil, later radicalized by the Jansenists, was taken up in a much more restrained way in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cfr. § 5 633, 1037). Can it be said that on this point, in recent decades, there has been a kind of ‘development of dogma’ that the Catechism should definitely take into account?” Despite the Jansenist red herring, the good Jesuit admits that the Creed, as quoted by St. Ignatius himself, St. Francis Xavier, the Council of Trent, and the CCC all accept the objective reality of the necessity of the Church and her Sacraments for Salvation. Since this is a “hard saying,” he implies, has there been a “development of doctrine” that allows for a softer way out?
The Pope’s response is interesting. “There is no doubt,” the Pontiff declares, “that on this point we are faced with a profound evolution of dogma. While the fathers and theologians of the Middle Ages could still be of the opinion that, essentially, the whole human race had become Catholic and that paganism existed now only on the margins, the discovery of the New World at the beginning of the modern era radically changed perspectives. In the second half of the last century it has been fully affirmed the understanding that God cannot let go to perdition all the unbaptized and that even a purely natural happiness for them does not represent a real answer to the question of human existence. If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost — and this explains their missionary commitment — in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council that conviction was finally abandoned.” Now, there are two problems with His Holiness’ response — one historical, the second doctrinal.
The historical issue is that if the discovery of an unevangelised half of the world was sufficient to destroy the need to evangelise it, how much more so should it have done when the Twelve Apostles and Seventy Disciples first set out to convert a world entirely unreached? Since, on that first Pentecost, there were no Catholics outside the Upper Room, ought they have not simply stayed there and left the rest of the world to be saved on its own terms? But that was not their reaction, nor was it that of the “the great missionaries of the 16th century” whom the Pope apparently much admired. The doctrinal problem is encapsulated in Pope St. Pius X’s anti-Modernist oath, which the young Josef Ratzinger took at his ordination to the subdeaconate. He declared, among other things, that “I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously.”
There were, however, two practical problems with this change that the Pope cited forthrightly: “From this came a deep double crisis. On the one hand this seems to remove any motivation for a future missionary commitment. Why should one try to convince the people to accept the Christian faith when they can be saved even without it? But also for Christians an issue emerged: the obligatory nature of the faith and its way of life began to seem uncertain and problematic. If there are those who can save themselves in other ways, it is not clear, in the final analysis, why the Christian himself is bound by the requirements of the Christian faith and its morals. If faith and salvation are no longer interdependent, faith itself becomes unmotivated.”
The Holy Father then goes on to consider and discount various possibilities, including Karl Rahner’s dictum that “The Christian, therefore, coincides with the human and, in this sense, every man who accepts himself is a Christian even if he does not know it.” Indeed, he admits that there is not at the moment any convincing way to square the circle, and concludes by saying “It is clear that we need to further reflect on the whole question.”
In a word, what is being sought here is a way of escaping the clear dogmatic teachings of the Church. Another such attempt was made in 2005, shortly after Benedict XVI became Pope, with the International Theological Commission’s document, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised. Much ballyhooed before its publication by the media as being the Church’s abolition of Limbo, it sank into obscurity as soon as it was released. The reason was easy to find. Although doing its best to find a way to allow for Salvation without Baptism, the document’s historical analysis of the issue was entirely accurate, culminating in the simple statement, “Limbo, however, was the common Catholic teaching until the mid-20th century.” A few sentences later, this is followed by “In the 20th century, however, theologians sought the right to imagine new solutions, including the possibility that Christ’s full salvation reaches these infants.” To anyone who is not a professional theologian, this cannot help but appear as though, in the minds of its practitioners, theology is a sort of fantasy which can be altered at will for any reason. Certainly the behaviour of many bishops and priests during COVID would give many the impression that our Faith is not rooted in reality; well do I remember when many a parish website counseled its parishioners to “make a perfect act of contrition; make an act of spiritual communion; donate here.” Only one of these was certainly tangible.
The problem, of course, is that the theological foundations of the necessity of Baptism — Scripture, Tradition, and the Infallible Definitions of Ecumenical Councils are those of every other doctrine of the Church, to include Transubstantiation. The sorts of miracles we referred to in the beginning would bear out the idea that this dogma is really, actually, concretely, and eternally true. It rises and falls with Baptism, which indeed admits one to it — and the two Sacraments are symbolised by the Blood and Water that flowed from the side of Christ. Denial of the necessity of Baptism and the Church means denying the authenticity of all dogma and its sources — to say nothing of the Apostles of the 1st century and the “Great Missionaries of the 16th century.” I loved Benedict XVI and revere his memory — especially now, when his freeing of the Traditional Latin Mass and his creation of the Anglican Ordinariates seem especially dear. But in this area, he very much reflected the generality of theologians of his time, for whom Theology was not an attempt to discern a pre-existent reality, but a sort of exercise in fantasy. In being asked to choose between received teaching derived from the Scriptures, Apostles, Fathers, Doctors, and Missionaries on the one hand, and theologians of this type on the other, I am reminded of the question of Groucho Marx: “Who you gonna believe — your own eyes or me?”
