IGNORANCE IS BLISS

Like rude Athenian banqueteers, some commenters have tossed Diogenes  their ill-gnawed bones of abuse. The Dog will not drench the rascals as they deserve. Rather, Diogenes will make a stipulation of facts that are not in dispute: He accepts more or less, as the commenters assert, that the "slowness in class" and the educational deficiencies of the CMRI "professors" result, in part, from their zeal for the mission circuit. The Dog allows that the demands of travel make it impossible for the CMRI priests to keep up with the seminarians or to make up for what they never learned in the first place.

Therefore, let Diogenes propose a criterion requiring no special training or extraordinary natural gifts.  Let him measure a CMRI "professor" against an essential standard of the Church. Surely, if the "professor" fails in this respect, the Dog's tormenters will repent themselves of their misguided fervor. Diogenes has sought solely to bring to light the intellectual inadequacy of Mater Dei and its staff. Therefore, the Dog will stay on message by proposing the Church's position on intellectualism as the standard of comparison. Everybody will agree that one need not be an intellectual to reflect the orthodox viewpoint, which is Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy. That discipline should be a habit in any Catholic teacher's mind regardless of his academic preparation.

The Church affirms the primacy of the intellect and upholds the rôle of reason, illumined by faith, in both the natural and supernatural orders. Were this not the case, the formulæ of dogmatic definitions would be of no value. Theology, a true science, derives a body of truths from the undisputed data of divine revelation by making use of the process discursive reasoning. Dogmatic definitions and theological conclusions are, then, intelligible.

Diogenes now asks the viewer to read the following brief anecdote about a CMRI "professor":

In Dogmatic Theology, [the farmer priest] would quite frequently use such phrases as: "Don't understand it  -- believe it" and "it is a mystery". When asked questions, he would often shrug and answer, "I guess...I don´t know". 

This is not faith seeking understanding.  Did Diogenes not know the CMRI priests to be pious ignoramuses of the first order, he would say that their anti-intellectualism was of the same class as that condemned in Pascendi. Understand this: The CMRI ethos is fundamentally alien to Catholic thought. Their teachers are far removed from the days when professors of dogmatic theology at the humblest diocesan seminary always had a crisp and reliable Catholic answer for every seminarian's question. CMRI Catholicism is but a crude cartoon, as representative of the Church as The Simpsons is of family life.