{"id":3078,"date":"2007-02-05T12:06:21","date_gmt":"2007-02-05T12:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/even-more-heresy.html"},"modified":"2007-02-05T12:06:21","modified_gmt":"2007-02-05T12:06:21","slug":"even-more-heresy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/even-more-heresy.html","title":{"rendered":"Even more heresy!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, who has engaged Fr. Oakes on von Balthasar in the pages of First Things, enters the heresy fray:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Since, however, Oakes thinks words have enough meaning to make it worthwhile to distinguish between the orthodox and those selling out the Church, we can look for his standard. He decrees it explicitly: \u201cWhen the Western Church fissiparated in the sixteen century, the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them, and they thereby left both the Roman Church and themselves the poorer for it.\u201d<\/em> The Catholic Church has been \u201crobbed of key portions of its patrimony\u201d\u2013so not only have some of Mother Church\u2019s children become estranged, but, Oakes suggests, they have also made off with part of the deposit of faith, leaving the pantry half-empty. In short, Oakes\u2019 standard for orthodoxy is additive: The yin of the Romans must be brought together again with the yang of the Reformers for truth to be complete. <\/p>\n

Which puzzles me. For Oakes surely knows Vatican II clearly taught that \u201cthe sole Church of Christ . . . subsists in the Catholic Church,\u201d and that \u201cnevertheless many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines.\u201d (For an up-to-the-minute analysis of the Council fathers\u2019 understanding of the controversial \u201csubsists,\u201d one may refer to the 2007 tesina<\/em> of Fr. Robert Fromageot at the Angelicum.) <\/p>\n

From the official Catholic perspective, then, the Catholic Church conserves the whole truth, while the \u201cseparated brethren\u201d share in many elements of it. The contribution to a deeper appreciation and appropriation of Christ\u2019s truth that can result from Protestant emphases on different aspects of the shared truth might then be likened, in an anemic analogy, to fluorescent highlighting on portions of a text: The words were there but merit more attention. Then again, if Fr. Oakes\u2019 standard is what he says, it doesn\u2019t puzzle me that he finds \u201cgreater doctrinal fellowship among many Protestants\u201d than among \u201cfar too many Catholic theologians\u201d: His standard is one of Protestant ecclesiology.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, who has engaged Fr. Oakes on von Balthasar in the pages of First Things, enters the heresy fray: Since, however, Oakes thinks words have enough meaning to make it worthwhile to distinguish between the orthodox and those selling out the Church, we can look for his standard. He decrees it explicitly: \u201cWhen…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nEven more heresy! - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/even-more-heresy.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Even more heresy! - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, who has engaged Fr. Oakes on von Balthasar in the pages of First Things, enters the heresy fray: Since, however, Oakes thinks words have enough meaning to make it worthwhile to distinguish between the orthodox and those selling out the Church, we can look for his standard. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}