Dogma and Mental Health

Extract

These opening words of the Aihanasium, and countles other pronouncements of the Church to simile effect have been an occasion of much opprobrium and of genuine perplexity. They would indeed be detestable, even blasphemous, were they understood to mean that God arbitrarily trarily insists that the recitation of a right password, e.g. homoousias, Jilioque, transubstantiatio, ensured admission through the heavenly gates, while the utterance of an incorrect formula—homoiousias, subordinate, consubstantiatio, was a meaningless guarantee of the pains of hell. Such monstrous misconceptions are not at all behind the Church's meticulous formulations of dogma or her vigorous anathemas to heresy. She knows full well that, as the Vatican Council says, ‘Divine mysteries by their very nature so transcend the created mind, that even when delivered by revelation and accepted by faith, they remain covered by the veils of faith itself, and are, it were, wrapped in cloud’ (Denzinger, 1796).