Here They Stand?

Martin Luther was convinced that justification by faith alone was orthodox, and no matter how many times or by whom he was told that it simply was not, that spurred him only to wage war on the authorities that did so, up to and including the See of Peter. He was not the first like that, nor has he been the last. In our own time, we have the proponents of Marian Co-Redemption. They have now been told that the title “Co-Redemptrix” might still be used in private devotion provided that anyone who did so meant it in a sense that practically no one who did so ever would, but that it was expressly banned from the Liturgy and from the official documents of the Holy See, in which case no one should wish to use it in private devotion. Get the message.

This month has made it clear that there were Catholics who took their lead from sedevacantists or from El Palmar de Troya, which latter, at least, would suit their tastes perfectly. They are as pernicious as any liberal. This is not about ecumenism. The Truth is the Truth, and there will only ever have been anything much to ecumenism when a church full of Pentecostalists chanted Salve Regina. Rather, the Church’s defined dogma is already complete with regard to Our Blessed Lady’s cooperation in the Redemptive Work of Her Divine Son, and the movements to proclaim Her Co-Redemptrix have been motivated by the desire, not to summarise that dogmatic corpus in that title as Popes had occasionally done, but to assert Her equality with Him in that Work. The Collyridians probably never existed in the days of Saint Epiphanius of Salamis. But they do now, complete with the pastries.

Their position is blasphemy and heresy, leading to idolatry and sacrilege. It is “another Gospel”, resembling Mormonism in its distortion of classically Christian vocabulary into a polytheism that included a Mother Goddess, although Mormons rarely mention theirs, whereas what we have here is more like Shaktism. Both are called to mind by the prominence of ostensible seers and gurus. Catholics are required to accept the principle of private revelation, permitted to accept those specific examples which the Church had formally approved, and forbidden to accept those which She had formally repudiated. In any event, no private revelation can be a basis for dogma. Those invoked by the proponents of Marian Co-Redemption manifestly fail 1 John 4:1, and any apparent blessing flowing from them should be referred to Galatians 1:8 and to 2 Corinthians 11:14.