No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Extract
When Hans Kiing attacked infallibility as it has been understood in Roman theology until recently, he was accused by no less a theologian than Karl Rahner of being in effect a liberal Protestant. But the majority of friendly critics were more inclined to ask what all the fuss was about. Nobody took this theory of infallibility seriously any longer. There were undoubtedly situations where Church and Pope had to take a stand and, if the promises of the Church’s endurance were to mean anything, this must mean infallibility in teaching: the Holy Spirit would guarantee the Church’s freedom from error on such occasions. But they were rare enough and a ‘sensitive exegesis’ could always take care of out-dated definitions.
Charles Davis, a little earlier, had chosen to leave the Church because he could not accept the current explanation of papal claims, the present ‘structures’ which prevent even the most sympathetic bishops from treating their subjects with charity or even justice. But Gregory Baum and others were at hand to show that this brilliant young theologian was still too much entangled in nineteenth-century apologetics.
The latest critic of Church structures, more particularly of the papacy, is Fritz Leist. Angry as he is and in deadly earnest as the above were in deadly earnest, he is not a young man. He will be sixty in 1973.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1972 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 511 note 1 ‘Factory Time’, by Dennis Johnson (Nottingham tobacco worker), in Work, Ed Fraser, Ronald, Penguin Books, 1968.Google Scholar
page 512 note 1 Leist, Fritz, Der Gefangene des Vatikans, Kösel‐Verlag, Munich, 1971Google Scholar.
page 512 note 2 Bishops, of course, no longer maintain a baronial splendour, but neither have they obtained a Magna Carta, establishing beyond all doubt their collegial rights. And the position of the overlood remains untouched by Vatican II.
page 514 note 1 Also from Kosel Verlag.
page 514 note 2 Racing through Mass was certainly an abuse at that time, but it was an abuse which arose more easily when the congregation was disregaded and the priest concentrated simply on the correctness of word and gesture. Heer gives the example of a group of Austrian monks who had a wager about who could say Mass with the greatest speed: the winner took fourteen minutes. And I remember a very devout and conscientious priest in this country who felt that we ought not to introduce English in the liturgy, ‘because it would sound terrible when we gabble it’.
page 515 note 1 Ignatius, , Epistle to the Romans, prologue: translation by Srawley, J. H., S.P.C.K., 1920Google Scholar. Whatever the meaning attached by Ignatius to Duchesne's interpretation seems to express the substance of our hope for the future: ‘As the bishop in his diocese presides over its works of charity, so does the Roman Church preside over those same works throughout Christendom’ (The Churches separted from Rome, London, 1907, p. 86)Google Scholar.