The question asked in the title may origin surprise. Can you answer specified a fundamental question in a short column?
It's definitely worth a try. I presume that all Catholic should know the answer to that question.
Z Credo we know that the Church is: One, Holy, Universal and Apostolic. But do we truly believe that only 1 – Catholic Church is real? Yes, we do!
Yet, the different interpretations of ecumenism and dialog with another religions seem to undermine this truth. As Catholics, we should have no doubt. We are to believe what our ancestors recognized, what everyone believed, everywhere and always in the Church. Woe to the cardinal or to the pope who would not accept this truth! Woe to us if we reject this dogma!
Calling on the words of the Lord Jesus to make 1 argument for the designation that the Church is 1 with heretics and schismatists is an aberration. The apostates broke unity, not the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ.
No synod or council can challenge the truths of religion due to the fact that they would deny their own convocation. The councils have the right to defend a deposit of faith, but they cannot replace it with something else.
Yes, the Pope and the Council are very serious among the faithful, but the more they deviate from Tradition, the more they ruin their authority. So what is Tradition?
Tradition is an unwritten deposit of religion given to us by the Apostles and preserved by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.
What results from the primacy of Tradition over another sources of theology? It is older than the Scriptures, for the Church already existed before the fresh Testament was written. More than that, the apostles were guarding it, who kept not all the truths of religion in writing, but nevertheless passed it on to their successors. As an example, the words of the Eucharistic prayer that Christ gave to the apostles after the resurrection, which is not entirely in the Holy Scriptures, can be followed by Saint Thomas of Aquinas! How, then, did the reformers of the Roman liturgy err erstwhile they introduced freedom in this regard, and along with the Roman canon they allowed another Eucharistic prayers taken from oriental traditions or even worse written on the knee (what do any liturgists suggest)?
This tradition is so Fidei ruleWho abandons her, she de facto performs from the Church. This is evidenced by the life of St. Atanaze, which was condemned by bishops who fell into arianism. Yet, his faithfulness to orthodoxy saved him from the apostasy of his brothers in the bishopric.
Shepherds who do not care about the continuity and compatibility of Catholic teaching exposure their sheep to certain demolition in the ocean of novelty. The Holy Spirit watches over the Church and will surely not let the full community to fall into the confusion of heresy. The question is, how large will the number of believers be to His voice? Perhaps only a fistful of bishops will preserve the Apostolic Tradition! Thepostasy of Rome will be 1 of the signs of the end times, as St. Paul suggested in his Letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thess 2:1-12). The apostle of the Nations did not usage the name of a peculiar city, but the capital of Peter is simply a determinant for the full Church.
Catholicism is, therefore, primarily a faithfulness to Tradition!
Read also:
P. Krzemiński: Bishop who guards the deposit