Status Updates From True and False Reform in th...

"Unquestionaly, Luther had a kind of theological genius, but he allowed himself to be guided and finally ruined by polemic. He allowed himself to be pushed into becoming the founder of a church and into rethinking the meaning of Christianity all by himself. The fatal logical of his postion was this: he had to reinvent Christianity not with the whole church and within it- but against the church..." p 270

“One of the fundamental errors of Jansenism was to take its inspiration from the texts of St. Augustine without maintaining sufficient docility toward the concrete life of the contemporary church.” P 261

“Protestantism, in its desire to give ‘glory to God alone,’ has come to see in Christianity nothing but the act of God and not the aspect of a given reality; so it has emptied out the full meaning of the church, postulating simply Pentecost, but without its ecclesial consequences.” P 252

“The schismatic reformer is someone who, having made his principle for truth not the reality of the church but his own ideas and his own judgement, takes for his motto: ‘Remain as you are, and judge everything by your own thinking’.”p 228

“Every reform that is the fruit of pure deduction, like any system elaborated purely by mental reflection, even if the deduction and the construction are drawn from dogmatic sources, will almost infallibly lead to something that will betray the concrete reality of the church and that the church will reject.” p 217

“Great reformers generally are simplifiers. This can be a strength but also a danger.” p 215

“For the heretic, the church is something to rediscover or reconstruct, for the faithful, the church exists concretely, call the faithful to serve it, nourish it, and work within it.”p 217

“The first consequence of an error is to change the concrete circumstances of doctrinal work- to change the sense or rather the meaning of the words (what they evoke, rather than what they say), the problematic that is, the very context of the questions.” p 210

“The church likes things defined, things that manifest clearly what they imply and that don’t hold surprises. Above all, Rome, which has the principal responsibility for the Catholic communion and thus a responsibility to “test spirits,” is reticent about whatever is new. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Rome has long shown so much hesitations with respect to ‘ecumenism’.”- p 205

“It is a fact of history that certain Augustinian themes, including some of his most essential and greatest texts, have encouraged extremely dangerous positions, even clearly heretical ones, right down to the reformation and even after it.” - p 202