About the 'White is Black, Black is White' Rule

from the blog Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit

http://goodjesuitbadjesuit.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-could-not-accept-that-rule.html

Thursday, February 3, 2011
I Could Not Accept That Rule

Terrence W. Tilley, Ph.D. (page 4) said that he first encountered the 13th of 18 rules of the Rules for Thinking with the Church set forth in Loyola's Spiritual Exercises while attending Brophy College Preparatory School, a Jesuit institution in Phoenix. "Scholastics and ordained—sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly—recruited me and other promising classmates for the order," he said.

"But the scholastics told us [the 13th rule] bluntly—that if any of us thought some thing was white and the hierarchical church said it was black, we had to believe it was black". "Long before I accepted the philosophical dictum that our beliefs are mostly not under the direct control of our wills, I knew I could not accept that rule."

Tilley explained that he began to appreciate the importance of the mandate in 1993, when he read a talk that Dulles gave to Jesuits at a symposium in Mexico. He said that one reason for the rule may have been to attempt to ward off charges against Ignatius that accused him of being a member of the "Illuminati."
Link (here) to the full article at the Fordham Ram

Rule 13

That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black. For we must undoubtedly believe, that the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of the Orthodox Church His Spouse, by which Spirit we are governed and directed to Salvation, is the same;…
Link (here)

Posted by Joseph Fromm at 1:00 AM Labels: Fordham University

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If he cannot accept that rule, then he does not accept the authority of the Magisterium, which means he does not accept Christ, who founded the Catholic Church and conferred upon its first bishops the authority to teach bindingly in his name. That is to say, if he cannot accept that rule, then he is not a good Catholic. That rule does not only bind Jesuits; a form of that rule binds all Catholics.

February 3, 2011
5:01 PM


TonyD said...

I enjoyed Dr. Tilley’s post. It reminded me of some of the lectures
we had in theology class.

As I recall, we spent quite a bit of time discussing the “disconnect” between Ignatius writings – such as the rule mentioned -- and his actual decisions and positions with respect to the Church.

In the end, I think most of the class agreed with Dr. Tilley’s point that Ignatius was writing for a particular audience, and, as Dr. Tilly says: “the rule may have been to attempt to ward off charges against Ignatius” as opposed to those who would interpret the rule as some sort of commandment that supersedes judgment.

February 3, 2011
11:50 PM