Not Vatican II's Fault

Just systemic issues that weren't and couldn't be solved just by a synod.

Sunt lacrimae rerum https://t.co/gzuFFZQJyr

— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) August 29, 2020

Elsewhere:

Possibly the most painfully ironic photo ever taken: the dumpster of a liberal Catholic monastery, full of sixty copies of Our Latin Heritage. pic.twitter.com/YQASbmgySc

— Urban Hannon (@hannonregular) August 28, 2020

The Beheading of St. John the Baptist 2020

NLM

The beheading of the Forerunner became an act of divine dispensation, for he preached to those in hell the coming of the Savior. Let Herodias lament, for she entreated lawless murder, loving not the law of God nor eternal life, but that which is false and temporal (Kont., Tone 5) pic.twitter.com/l9DI75zPYv

— St Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary (@stvlads) August 29, 2020

St. John the Baptist in Deesis of Hagia Sophia, Bearing Witness in Chora, Baptism of Christ in Neonian Baptistery (Ravenna), Fresco at Museum of Byzantine Culture (Thessaloniki)
Today is commemoration of the beheading of the Holy and Glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John pic.twitter.com/4whJYFq1K1

— The Byzantine Legacy (@ByzantineLegacy) August 29, 2020

Integralism as Default

Timon Cline

This month @ConciliarPost I look at the utility of integralism as descriptive (if not normative): https://t.co/cgHjQZzNx2

— Timon Cline (@tlloydcline) August 28, 2020

My response: the problem is not that the state is just of the wrong confession at the moment; the problem is the state itself. Filling the state with believing Catholics or Christians will not eliminate this fundamental problem of scale.

Jeff Mirus on Latin Integralism

The return of “Integralism”? https://t.co/Zrf4XaZkQJ @FormTheCulture

— The Catholic Thing (@catholicthing) August 27, 2020

Recognizing that the Church is the arbiter not only of Divine Revelation but of what God reveals through creation in what we call the Natural Law, I am more inclined to want to get the natural law right, to study Catholic social teaching with great care, and to develop a political party that combines the best and most comprehensive recognition of the corresponding principles that ought to animate both the social order and government itself.

Latins claim this as a part of the authority of the Church (see CCC 2036 and Dignitatis Humane 14), but where is the warrant within Apostolic Tradition? Setting aside those secondary precepts which are not directly directly through reasoning but are determined by reason or are applications of reason in finding a convention to order some state of affairs (e.g. driving on which side of the road), there are several points to be made.

1. There are precepts of Natural Law that have nonetheless been revealed directly by God as well. These have been passed down as a part of Sacred Tradition. So bishops can be said to be arbiters of the Natural Law, in so far as they have received it as a part of God's revelation to Israel and in Christ. But does that revelation include all possible secondary precepts?
2. Knowing apart from Divine Revelation the "fullness" of the Natural Law requires not intellectual virtue but moral virtue. Do bishops have a special charism from the Holy Spirit that replaces the need for this and the habit of synderesis and the logical reasoning required as well? This is a more dubious claim.

That the Church possesses the authority to teach the precepts of the Natural Law is probably a long-standing Latin theological opinion. (Going back to Trent if not some time before, during the medieval period?) I'd like to read a treatise or manual that show some nuance in presenting this. Can the patriarchate of Rome cite one of its "ecumenical councils" as an authority espousing this opinon? I am doubtful, since the CCC makes no such reference.

See the old CE entry on the Natural Law.

Voluntarism? Nominalism?

OUP: Political Theology of International Order by William Bain

Defenses and critiques of modern politics will ultimately come back to the choice between a metaphysics of inherent order or divine fiat, so which should we choose? https://t.co/lgv4xL7DN0

— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) August 28, 2020

Theological Roots of the Secular World Order by Nathaniel Peters

Did people with power and influence really believe in legal voluntarism? Or were they just acting in accordance with their appetites? Is this sort of genealogy, putting the blame on late medieval theology/philosophy for "modernity" really still useful, in comparison with a proper study of history?