This is an expression of the low Christology, neo-Arianism Jesus infecting Catholicism since Vatican II:
Anyone my age and older knows that the pre-Vatican II Church, in union with the Church of the East, including the Eastern Orthodox, promoted a high Christology of Jesus Christ, crucified and Risen.
This flowed from the Councils of Nicaea and Ephesus.
This high Christology was maintained both in the East and West in the liturgies of the Church, especially the Mass or Divine Liturgy, but also in devotions, prayers and bodily postures at prayer and liturgies. The East had its own forms of public piety and reverence but equal to the West’s in terms of the foundation of a high Christology.
All of this was a result of the fight against the Arian heresies. If one does not hold a high Christology or agrees with Arias and his heresies, one’s relationship to Christ is dumbed down, not only in theology but also religious practices.
After Vatican II, the Church of the West, but, thanks be to God, not the Church of the East, began to dabble in a modified Arian heresy. The humanity of Jesus, during his public ministry, not after His glorious crucifixion, resurrection, Ascension and Sending of His Holy Spirit, was emphasized.
Emphasizing Jesus as a Good Buddy, Friend, Brother and just an all around Nice Guy had and has ramifications for the spirituality of the Western Church, the style or ethos of her liturgies, her piety and her forms of reverence.
For the most part, all of the external forms of piety and reverence were either dumbed down or thrown out in the post-Vatican II reforms of the Church’s liturgies and the practices of piety, devotion and rubrics for the Mass.
Comparing the prescribed rubrical forms of external piety required by bishops and priests in the liturgy in terms of the pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II ways of celebrating Mass and also including how the laity express that reverence in liturgies, we see the deleterious effects of a neo-Arianism on the post-Vatican II Church and her liturgies, reverence and external expressions of piety.
It’s a kind of Protestant folksiness in terms of how one views Christ in personal terms and the jettison of formality and reverence in that relationship. Fellowship, folksiness and casualness mark many of the local celebration of the Modern Mass today—a neo-Arianism.
Again, this has not, for the most part, affected the Church of the East in union with Rome and certainly not Eastern Orthodoxy.
The anti-rubricism of the modern Mass, along with an antipathy for kneeling for Holy Communion and receiving externally in a casual, on-the-move way, standing, in the hand and by anyone trained or not trained to be a Eucharistic Minister all goes back to an interpretation of Vatican II that promotes a neo-Arianism. This includes, too, the liturgical practice of the Church in terms of ad orientem!
I think Pope Leo gets this faux or neo-Arianism in his new Apostolic Letter on the Council of Nicaea. It remains to be seen if His Holiness can connect the dots in terms of the current crisis of Catholicism in the West and its neo-Arianism expressed in the Modern Liturgy.
This is how Silire non possum describes it:
The new Apostolic Letter In unitate fidei by Pope Leo XIV arrives at a historical moment in which religious confusion is no less insidious than the turmoil that shook the Church in the fourth century. Then as now, faith risks being reduced to a symbolic language, a private emotion, a moral portrait of Jesus rather than the concrete confession of God made man. The Pope brings the entire Church back to the source: the Nicene profession of faith, the heart of Christianity, “because in Jesus Christ, consubstantial with the Father, God has become our neighbor.”
Leo XIV’s work is not archaeology; it is a judgment on the present. To understand it, one must grasp the theological logic the Letter employs—a logic that shines precisely where early Christian thought reached its maturity. And its core threads emerge from what the great patristic tradition always taught: faith cannot endure unless it preserves the full mystery of Christ
The decisive question is not “What do we think about Jesus?” but “Who is Jesus?”
The Apostolic Letter recalls that the question asked at Caesarea Philippi - “Who do you say that I am?” - is not an ancient echo but the living crossroads that always separates authentic faith from its caricature. Leo XIV shows that Arianism was not an accidental episode in history but a recurring temptation: reducing Christ to an intermediary, an exalted being yet not fully God. The same logic that once threatened the faith - the greatest danger to Christian doctrine because it denied the Son’s real participation in the Father’s essence - reappears today in subtler forms: Jesus as a moral teacher, a spiritual symbol, an “energy of goodness.”
This is why the Letter restates with clarity the Nicene formula: “begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father”.This is not technical theology; it is the very condition for saying anything true about salvation. Faith cannot rest on vague religious feelings. Faith “stands or falls” on the Son’s consubstantiality.
Without the true divinity of the Son, salvation does not exist.
In unitate fidei forcefully recalls what the ancient tradition understood with radical clarity: only God saves. If Christ is not fully God, redemption dissolves into myth. Leo XIV states this openly by drawing from the patristic core: salvation is not an idea, nor psychological comfort, nor an ethical journey; it is the incursion of the Infinite into human flesh. Christ “descended” for us – descendit - a word the Pope highlights because it contains the whole Christian paradox: the downward movement of the Most High, the self-emptying that reveals glory. The Letter shows that the truth of the Incarnation - total, real, without docetic reductions - is what ensures that our humanity has been reached in all its depths, redeemed in both body and soul, in what is most fragile and most great within us.
Early Christian theology insisted on one principle: God truly became man to make man capable of God. Without this ontological reality, Christianity becomes moral philosophy. With it, Christianity becomes an event: our nature is raised, healed, divinized.
The real problem of ancient Arianism - and its modern versions
Leo XIV’s reading is not nostalgic; it is surgical. The Pope sees that the contemporary crisis - Christological relativism, psychological reduction of faith, doctrinal uncertainty - arises from the very root the Fathers fought: a concept of God that is too small. For Arius, the Son was an intermediate being, unable to know the Father fully, subject to change. Leo XIV shows that similar notions circulate today beneath more refined language: “Christianity as inspiration,” “Jesus as an exceptional prophet,” “God as pure spiritual energy.” The Apostolic Letter responds by affirming that the infinite distance between God and humanity has been bridged only because the Son is God. And it adds a crucial point: the Incarnation is not a sacred myth but a historical, concrete, verifiable fact, held by the faith with the firmness of the Creed.
Unity of faith is not uniformity, but communion in truth
In unitate fidei does not propose doctrinal rigidity. It proposes a criterion: Christian unity arises only if the truth of Christ is preserved integrally. Like the Fathers of Nicaea - guided by the conviction that the Church transmits a received faith, not an invented one - Leo XIV asks the Church today not to bend doctrine to cultural fashions. The Pope is not speaking of nostalgia but of foundations: the Creed is not the past; it is the compass for navigating times of bewilderment. Christianity without dogma dissolves into spiritualism. Christianity with dogma lives because it remains anchored to the event from which it was born.
Nicaea as light for the present: a Christianity capable of inhabiting history
Leo emphasizes a point the ancient theology showed with force: God is not a static and distant being, but the One who enters history, even into its wounds. This dismantles the caricature of an “immutable” God as indifferent. True divine immutability - as the Fathers taught - is the immutability of self-giving love, not inertia. This is why the Pope connects the profession of faith with the wounds of the world: wars, injustices, fears. Not because the Gospel is a social tool, but because only God-with-us can be a credible hope for humanity.
Hope is not an idea. It is a Presence
What In unitate fidei tells us is clear: the Church cannot lose Christ without losing herself. This magisterial text is an act of guardianship and freedom. Guardianship of the apostolic faith; freedom from cultural trends that wish to reduce Christianity to just another discourse. Leo XIV places again at the center what the Fathers defended with courage and intelligence: only if Christ is true God and true man is Christianity truly good news. Everything else - reductionist, symbolic, spiritualistic interpretations - is nothing but an elegant revival of an ancient temptation: a God who does not save, a Christ who does not change life, a faith that does not generate hope.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum
5 comments:
And the same could be said about the position of Our Lady: is she just a co-operative young woman or is she 'the highest honour of our race' ? If Jesus falls so does Mary.
While I am not opposed to the theology of Mary as Co-Redemptrix or Co-Mediatrix, I have never taught it as something that I should teach as these are theological constructs believe by many people, popes, bishops, priests, religious and laity, but never codified as a proclaimed doctrine by any Council or pope. When I have taught these two things, I always make sure that there is no misunderstanding about Mary being “equal” to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit other than cooperating by the fullness of faith, a unique and singular gift given to her, to share in the Salvific plan of God. But, I would say, that the title “Mother of God” lends itself to more confusion in the minds of some, than co-Redemptrix or Mediatrix and it too has to be explained properly. A good apologetic is needed. Thus, given the dogma of Mary, the Mother of God, it seems to flow from that the belief in Co-Redemptrix and Co-Mediatrix. A part of Protestantism’s neo-Arianism is that they don’t promote or believe Mary is any of these and find it abhorrent even when properly explained. Eastern Orthodoxy will not accept Co-Remptrix or Co-Mediatrix, not because it isn’t compatible with Mother of God, but because it is a Western thing that the East hasn’t developed.
Father McDonald, what you're saying makes sense -- Nestorianism was the response to Arianism, and that is what Roman Catholicism has been experiencing for a long, long time. Some suggest that devotions like that to the Sacred Heart are fundamentally Nestorian, for example. So, with the history of those sorts of devotions, it is logical that some of your faithful fell into Nestorian ways of thinking: elevating the Humanity of Christ over His Divinity.
I'm not criticizing Roman Catholicism on this point as these things are difficult to keep in balance. I'm merely pointing out that the genesis of your current issues may lie further back in time that just Vatican II.
I haven’t thought about it that way. But yes, I do teach that the development of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus helped to balance a very high Christology at the time in the 1600’s where even Jesus was seen as to lofty for a personal relationship as His mission was to judge us and look for that which would lead us to our damnation. During this time, one’s relationship with the Mother of God was more familial and not provoking fear and trembling. I’m not sure how Eastern Orthodoxy then and now balances that out in its own popular piety. But in pre-Vatican II times, popular devotions flourished, precisely because of what you say—but these were never dragged into the formal liturgies of the Church or the liturgy influence by popular piety. There has to be the proper balance, though, between Jesus two natures, Human and Divine, even in His Glorious Risen reality that still has Flesh. Do the Orthodox have popular piety as a group or at home as individuals or families. I know that the Orthodox believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar, but do not honor the Reserved Sacrament in any way by showing piety before the place of reserving the Sacrament as reservation is only for Holy Communion to the sick or dying. I find that a bit peculiar that no development based on a high Christology has occurred in Orthodoxy or even in the Eastern Rite’s of the Church as it concerns Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
I think Orthodoxy maintains the balance in a few ways. One of those is in concert with your mode of thinking: liturgy matters. The liturgy is primary in Orthodoxy, and we haven't seen reconfigurations of the liturgy that caused confusion among the people like Roman Catholicism has seen.
Second, to your question of devotions: There really aren't devotions as such in Orthodoxy. For the most part, the prayer lives of the faithful are not individually determined by the individual on the basis of devotion to some particular image or form of piety. The people have a prayer rule that is usually drawn from a prayer book that is common to all the people within that particular Orthodox Church. So, the popular piety is not as individualistic as it is in Roman Catholicism, which avoids some of these problems.
Finally, Orthodoxy teaches that Christ is present in the Eucharist. Adoration to Christ in the Eucharist occurs during the Divine Liturgy. Why are there no "Adoration Chapels" in Orthodoxy? I would be speculating, but it might because there was never a Protestant Reformation in the East that denied Christ's Presence in the Mystery that necessitated a strong reaction to bolster the teaching. Devotion to the Real Presence (although we wouldn't really use that phrase) is quite strong during the Liturgy and when moving about the Temple at all times, though. It's an interesting topic for further thought.
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