The Catholic Rule of Faith is Dogma

John Henderson

The word “Church” is often used ambiguously and it is important to define in what sense we are using the term when discussing the relationship between the post-conciliar crisis of faith and the Church's attribute of infallibility. Most of us Catholics have learned an Act of Faith that is substantially the same as what follows:

O my God, I firmly believe that Thou art one God in three divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost; I believe that Thy divine Son became man and died for our sins, and that He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived. Amen.

It is clear from the Act of Faith that dogmas are the truths which the “Church teaches” that must be believed because “Thou [God] has revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived.” Dogmas are the only truths that can be believed on the authority of God revealing. Vatican I teaches:

By divine and catholic faith, all those things are to be believed which are contained in the word of God as found in scripture and tradition, and which are proposed by the church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium.

We are said to believe dogmas by “divine faith” because of the authority of God revealing; by “catholic faith” because they are proposed by the Church as being “divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium.” The ex cathedra definitions of popes, the canons of Ecumenical Councils, and the articles of Creeds are all “solemn judgments” proposed by the Church as being divinely revealed dogmas. Teachings that have never been defined by a solemn judgment but which have been held by Catholics always and everywhere as being divinely revealed are also dogmas that are knowable as such because they have been taught by the Church's “ordinary and universal magisterium.” Dogma is the Catholic's rule of faith and this is proven by the definition of a heretic as a baptized person who refuses to believe one or more dogmas of the faith. If a teaching is not a dogma, then no Catholic is bound to believe it with divine faith and it would be wrong to speak of it as being a “teaching of the Church” if we are using the word “Church” in the same sense in which it is used in the Act of Faith. If we use the word “Church” in this sense, then the false teachings of the modernists who have controlled the hierarchy for the last 50+ years do not present the slightest problem as regards the Church's attribute of infallibility because their teachings are their own and not the Church's. Their teachings cannot be believed with “divine and Catholic faith” because they have never been proposed as being divinely revealed by solemn judgment (The last time that a pope defined anything ex cathedra was when Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950. Vatican II did not include any canons or other definitions and was merely pastoral). Also, novel teachings, by definition, cannot be part of the ordinary and universal magisterium because the word “universal” includes the attribute of time.

The Church has never proposed by solemn judgement any false teachings. There is no reason to become a sedevacantist. All that is needed is a restoration of dogma as the Catholic's rule of faith.