New Old Faces (Part 1): The New Face of Pelagius

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Below is a the first instalment of a three-part series for The Catholic Weekly, and focuses on paragraph 73 of the Instrumentum Laboris of the Plenary Council. The Plenary council is organised by the Australian Catholic Bishop Conference in an attempt to renew the life of the Church in Australia, and the first sessions will be held later this year. I will dedicate three posts to focus on a mention of two new faces of old heresies: namely Pelagianism and Gnosticism, and how they interface with the Plenary Council’s overarching theme of renewal. Having looked at these new-but-old faces, the posts will analyse these and then look at the motif of the ever-ancient-ever-new face of Christ as the foundation for genuine renewal in the Church.

I wish to focus aspects of the Theological Reflection of the Instrumentum Laboris of the Plenary Council. In particular, I wish to focus on those that fall under the heading “The Joy of the Gospel”.

References to the Gospel as the touchstone for the renewal of the Church might strike some as pretty obvious on the one hand, or trite on the other. Either way, what that means is that we could be tempted to glibly refer to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, before parsing it off to focus on the real business of formulating the techniques and strategies of renewal, as if one had little to do with the other.

This temptation to disconnect one from the other is why the Instrumentum did well to remind us of two tendencies that Pope Francis called the New Pelagianism and the New Gnosticism (n. 73). In the next few columns I hope to show what these terms mean, why these will run counter to the talk of renewal and why the face of Christ is what grounds genuine renewal in the Church.

In the ancient Church, the Pelagians taught the heresy that sin happened, not because of a fallen human nature, but because of human choice and action alone. By extension, development in the spiritual life, including one’s own redemption from sin, could also take place through human choice and action alone. Salvation then hinged, not on God’s grace, but…

Read the full text on The Catholic Weekly

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