Heresies of Presumption, by Michael Pakaluk

By Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing, July 22, 2021

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. ..

Note: Cardinals Gerhard Mueller and Raymond Burke, Fr. Gerald Murray, and I will appear on EWTN’s “The World Over” with Raymond Arroyo at 8 PM ET this evening (Thursday) …

There are certain goods Catholics enjoy, which they can take for granted.  This takes the form: they presume, usually on a false philosophy, that those goods are available to everyone, just as a basic fact, rather than solely as a consequence of the Sacrifice of Our Lord. And then they get all mixed up about the uniqueness of Christianity or extra ecclesia nulla salus.

Such persons are practical heretics, although they may not know it, and don’t mean to be.  It’s not that they deny a truth of the faith affirmed in the Creed.  They don’t say for example that there is only one person in God (Unitarianism) or that Jesus is not divine (Arianism).  Rather, they suppose something false, practically speaking, about the way of salvation.  I suspect many Catholics are like this, because raised in the faith they do not know the faith.  Converts are much less likely to go wrong by presumption. …