The New Double Truth Theory

Many years ago, during the Benedict XVI pontificate, I drew attention to a phenomenon which I dubbed Catholic "dogma ex voce" ("from the voice"). The essential observation of this post was that contemporary dissenters, embarrassed by the Church's traditional teachings, must use the subterfuge of contradicting them in lower level pronouncements in order to promote their garbage while being able to affirm the facade that the Church has "never changed" its teaching because the official pronouncements remain unchallenged. In that article from 2010, I wrote:

Obviously and thankfully, [authoritative declarations] cannot be gotten rid of. They can be ignored and wished away, but they will not go away. Definitive, infallible ex cathedra statements remain for all time and are irreformable of their very nature. No matter how much any bishop or cardinal would like to contradict or get rid of these dogmatic heirlooms, they cannot.

Yet, though these declarations will not go away, there is a way that the hierarchy has found to get around this problem. I have noticed that, in areas where the modern hierarchy takes vastly different positions than the traditional Church, novel positions are not given to the faithful by means of encyclicals or dogmatic statements, but are found throughout lower-level pronouncements, such as speeches, letters, addresses, bishops' statements etc. By repeating these novel positions again and again in very low-level pronouncements, the faithful get accustomed to hearing certain novelties "from the Church" and over time come to accept them as "Church teaching."

Though these sorts of novelties are not "official", they are spewed out with such regularity and from so many sources that the stupid Catholic faithful eventually come to associate them with "Church teaching" and accept them as "dogma" uncritically. It is essentially the old adage that a lie, repeated enough, becomes taken as the truth. This is how the propaganda machine of dogma ex voce works to slowly undermine Catholic tradition while maintaining that the Church has not essentially "changed."

This has been going on for a long time; in my original article, I cite examples of it from the pontificate of John Paul II. Benedict XVI himself did it all the time in his personal writings and statements. Really its a post-conciliar phenomenon grounded in attempts to push the Spirit of Vatican II whilst simultaneously trying to reconcile the conciliar documents with traditional teaching, the old conservative Catholic two-step dance.

But in recent years it has reached new levels of intensity such that the Church really seems to be breaking down under a kind of institutional schizophrenia. The Amazon Synod brought this to the fore more than ever. The way things are developing, this practice has virtually evolved into a kind of "Double Truth Theory." The Double Truth theorem was an hypothesis proposed by the Latin Averroists of the 13th century as a means of reconciling philosophical principles which challenged Catholic dogma. Essentially, the Averroists asserted that religion and philosophy, as separate sources of knowledge, might arrive at contradictory truths without detriment to either—that something may be true from a philosophical perspective whilst being false from a theological perspective and vice verse. It was the opening salvo in a long war to detach philosophy (and science) from theology while being able to still affirm theological truths—in other words, to be able to affirm error while still paying lip-service to the Church's official pronouncements.

The Double Truth Theory, of course, is nonsense. There is only one truth, but we apprehend it under different modes or ways of knowledge. But ultimately if something is true, it cannot contradict another truth, be that truth philosophical, theological, moral, scientific, or whatever. We cannot say contradictory statements are all true, no matter how badly we might want to. Very rightly did St. Thomas Aquinas reject the Double Truth theorem as the nonsense that it is.

But is that not the very situation we see the hierarchy attempting to foist on us at the moment? Being at least nominally Catholic, these theologians and prelates cannot openly deny the teachings of the Ecumenical Councils or solemn pronouncements of the Church, nor contradict them with new solemn pronouncements. But what they can do is contradict those teachings through the ex voce method—ignoring the official pronouncements while making a slew of contradictory statements on the "unofficial" level: speeches, interviews, magazine articles, books, homilies, letters, and so on. In a pinch they can always claim that the Magisterium has not taught anything contrary to the faith—where "taught" is understood in a very specified way as a solemn teaching. But meanwhile they go about undermining the faith at every opportunity they can in a torrent of constant heterodoxy while expecting the faithful to believe that nothing substantial has changed. And meanwhile actual heretics (like Fr. James Martin) are permitted to continue spreading their poison unhindered, further lending credence to that the novelties being vomited out all over today are in fact "Church teaching."

They know exactly what they are doing as well. When they are among themselves or in gatherings of supporters, they openly boast of how they are undoing Catholic tradition and leading the Church into a brave new world.

In the old days, Catholic teaching served as a bulwark against the introduction of error because it was known that official Catholic teaching is irreformable. The modernists have gotten around this today, not by trying to overthrow the official teaching, but by simply leading us to a place where official teaching no longer matters. "Catholic dogma" is whatever the leaders of the Church happen to be bloviating about in their press conferences and interviews.