What's in a Name? & Nominalism: "Francis... proposing Statements & Pastoral Practices which are in Direct Contradiction to... Faith"
- In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. - Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism]
- Today is the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.
The name of God, and as we celebrate today in particular the Most Holy Name of the Second Person of the Triune Godhead, Jesus, should be spoken early and often, but always with complete reverence, and with a head bow, and a doffing of the hat for gentlemen outdoors.
There is a weird trend amongst the uncatechized and the heretical quasi-Christian sects, to adopt Jewish practices as some sort of a sign of piety. One of the most common is to write “God” as “G-d”. Make no mistake, to do this is to DENY THE INCARNATION AND THUS TO DENY THE TRINITY ITSELF. We say the Holy Name by God’s explicit command:
For anyone who has ever loved another, to hear the name of the beloved person spoken can make the heart fly. And, to hear the beloved speak one’s own name is also a great joy. Such is the case with Jesus Christ, who specifically said, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends, if you do the things that I command you. I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends: because all things whatsoever I have heard of My Father, I have made known to you.”
The Most Holy Name, spoken with complete reverence, is a declaration of love, and not only is all of heaven enraptured by its every utterance, but Our Lord Himself, that font of infinite love for each of us, requited or no, loves to hear those who love Him speak His Name with loving reverence. - Catholic pundit Ann Barnhardt
- It should be noted that the Nominalists under Abelard were the real progenitors of anti-Trinitarianism in the Reformation period as the Catholics saw it and this is the sentiment of Hugh Pope in his article on Socinianism (Cath. Encyc., Vol. XIV, p. 113). Properly termed anti-Realists, Nominalism was rejected by Catholic philosophy. Nominalism is concerned with explaining things in terms of individual and particular external reality... This process of thinking has enormous implications and consequences for the explanation of Causal Theory and the spirit world. Modern science and empirical thought are essentially concerned with explaining events in physical terms. The Nominalists developed their theories most particularly through Hume, Stuart Mill, Spencer, Huxley and Tain. The Catholics hold them to confound essentially distinct logical operations (the simple decomposition of sensible or empirical representations with abstraction properly so-called and also sensible analogy with the process of universalisation) (see De Wulf, Nominalism, Realism, Conceptualism, Cath. Encyc., Vol. XI, p. 93). The Catholic Aristotelians are held (by themselves) to distinguish carefully between both of these mental operations. Nominalism is irreconcilable with a spiritualist philosophy and, hence, also with Scholasticism. Kant’s Phenomenalism is also held to destroy all the bonds that might connect the concept with the external world (De Wulf, ibid.). The Catholics held until late this century [after Vatican II] that we do not create wholesale the object of our knowledge, but we beget it within us under the causal influence of the object that reveals itself to us (ibid.). This has implication for God’s willing self-revelation and, hence, the nature of God. The explanation of reality is as an ontology. Ontology is the science of the study of being. - CCG Study Papers [http://www.ccg.org/weblibs/study-papers/p185.html]
The scholar Thomist James Larson showed that the “Father of Vatican Council II" Cardinal John Newman was a Nominalist whose philosophy was apparently accepted by Francis and explains why he keeps "proposing statements and pastoral practices which are in direct contradiction to... Faith":Newman... embrace[s]... the philosophical position of
Nominalism. If the reality of all things in the exterior world is only unit and individual, and if universals
(dog, man, tree, etc) are not “real” in themselves, but rather only
human fabrications or creations, then they are only “names,” totally
lacking in real content. They are simply arbitrary mental
generalization and categorizations. They do not correspond to the
“eternal types” to be found in the “intellectual light” of God for all
eternity. All this, of course, flies directly in the face of Thomistic
metaphysics and natural philosophy.
The entirety of the Grammar of Assent is therefore devoted to
elaborating an allegedly valid grounds for assenting to the Catholic
Faith, established not upon the vertical dimension of Faith as so aptly
delineated by Cardinal Manning (the light of the human intellect
responding to the radiance of Divinely Revealed Truth), but rather upon
an experiential foundation which is a dimension within the interior of
man that corresponds to the empirical foundations of man’s outer
perceptions. This dimension – this empiricism of the soul – is called by
Newman the “illative sense.” It is equivalent to what Pope Pius X, in
his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (On the Doctrine of the
Modernists) termed the “religious sense”, and which he pinpointed as
that fundamental concept by which the Modernist replaces the absolute
objective reality and truth of the “God above” with a God and His Truth
who are evolving within man...
... Underneath all the subtleties and obfuscations, Newman’s epistemology enshrines “lived-experience” as the most vital principle in our assent of faith. As said previously, this amounts to an “empiricism of the soul,” and is a fundamental tenet of Modernism. It is no wonder, therefore, that both George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy, generally seen to be founders of Modernism, considered Newman to be their precursor. Tyrrell in fact declared himself to be a “devout follower of Newman”. Newman has been often called the “Father of Vatican Council II. He is also a “Father” of Modernism. In understanding this fact, we should no longer in any way be bewildered by his canonization by Pope Francis...
... Underneath all the subtleties and obfuscations, Newman’s epistemology enshrines “lived-experience” as the most vital principle in our assent of faith. As said previously, this amounts to an “empiricism of the soul,” and is a fundamental tenet of Modernism. It is no wonder, therefore, that both George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy, generally seen to be founders of Modernism, considered Newman to be their precursor. Tyrrell in fact declared himself to be a “devout follower of Newman”. Newman has been often called the “Father of Vatican Council II. He is also a “Father” of Modernism. In understanding this fact, we should no longer in any way be bewildered by his canonization by Pope Francis...
... This is why any militant condemnations (such as Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus) of such things as indifferentism, religious pluralism and separation of Church from State, Paganism, Islam, or Protestantism are virtually impossible to the “illative sense” of a Catholic Church now dominated by the epistemological orientation of which Newman is a primary architect...
... In other words the epistemology exemplified in John Henry Newman, and now incarnate in the Church, enshrines not only empiricism as the fundamental principle of knowledge in the human soul, but also establishes a schizophrenic and self-contradictory relationship between “notional” belief and “real” belief, and therefore between dogma and practice. It is now endemic in the Church with Pope Francis claiming to accept the entirety of the Catholic Faith, while proposing statements and pastoral practices which are in direct contradiction to this Faith. [http://rosarytotheinterior.com/does-god-love-us-an-examination-of-the-epistemology-of-john-henry-newman/]