The Dimonds Are Dishonest

2007-05-12T23:36:00.000-07:00

The Dimonds (Peter Dimond and Michael Dimond, of Holy Family Monastery) are dishonest. They claim to be sedevacantists and traditional Catholics who uphold the salvation dogma or extra ecclesiam nulla salus. I don't say this lightly. If someone were merely uneducated, and voluntarily ignorant, while I would call them lazy and stupid I would not call them overtly dishonest. They are buffoons because they should know better and still prefer to remain in incredulous delusions, causing people to conform to their blindness through clear ill will.

The Dimonds fail to distinguish between heresy and mortally sinful error. They also are incredibly wicked such that if you confront them on any point of dogma or fact they became extraordinarily angry and seek to engage in calumny against you in the public square. I and not a few others have been the subject of these sordid attacks and continue to be so. They are in fact liars and from the father of lies so far as I am concerned.

Let me offer one simple example. Peter Dimond in his work on the mass declares that the words "for all" are not used in any other formula of consecration in the history of the Catholic Church. This is absolutely false, I have a book from Adam S. Miller that clearly refutes this contention, and shows that one of the ancient Marionite rites uses the words "for all" in the words of consecration in a virtually identical way to that used in the new mass, and it was approved by the Roman Church in the middle ages. I find it hard to believe that Peter Dimond is unaware of this refutation and proof, yet he persists in adhering to his heretical thesis that the new rite of mass is guaranteed to be invalid on the grounds of its consecration formulae.

I need not mention that he also resorts to detraction, lying, and calumny, and creating false impressions in his writings- when he attempts to refute me or others on his web pages. I can direct no one to his writings or articles with his name appended, even if good points are made, for this very reason.

But there is another very important reason why the Dimonds are at the very least careless- and that is in the matter that they call, and I call, the "salvation dogma". Rightly, they defend the ancient teaching that outside of the visible confines of the Roman Church there is no salvation for the heretic and the infidel. Yet, they are dishonest because they will not present the full facts. First- they claim that if you deny their definitional intepretation of the dogma you are a heretic. This is simply dishonest. Many of the words used in the dogma have never been dogmatically defined, and so defining the words used in the dogma is a matter of theology. The matter evolves not to questions concerning acceptance of the dogma, but to questions as to the meanings of the words used in the dogma. The Dimonds, rightly, define "Church" in the sense which the majority of the Fathers that have come down to us define "Church". Yet this does not prove that all men are heretics who reject that definition of Church. It does mean that those who reject the ancient definition of Church knowingly are certainly treading in the territory of mortal sin and damnation however. Yet, it does not mean that they are cut off from the Church, because they accept the dogma, but just define its terms differently- appealing to some obscure heretofore unknown traditional definition that did not receive significant press. Of course, holding and promoting such an improbable position is highly irresponsible, and even Probabilism would denounce such a person as holding an opinion that is not even solidly probable. Even so, it cannot be denounced as heresy, and they cannot be denounced as heretics if they believe they have an ancient basis for such a definition, as improbable as it may be. The only way a person could denounce a dogma by altering the definition of one of the words of the dogmae is if they claimed a word of a dogma meant something, yet had a certain knowledge in their mind of the impossibility that the word could mean such a thing (ie attempting to make "baptism" mean something like a "car" or something totally dissimilar from the ancient usage and definition of the term- no one in their right mind could conceive of such a thing as even remotely plausible, and thus would not be denying just a definition of a word in a dogma, but the actual dogma itself).

But the EENS dogma is not quite so clear- because it is conceivable that some ancient bishop somewhere, whose writings are not commonly known and have not come down to us, did not consent to the predominant definition of Church as the ancients defined it. It is possible, though extremely unlikely (and hence generally mortally sinful to assert), that such ancient bishop held the valid apostolical traditional meaning of "Church". Thus when these men who are heterodox in spirit define Church in such a broad way as to include "separate brethren" like Protestants, Schismatics, and import all these meanings that are virtually unknown in the writings of the Fathers, it does not necessarily mean they are heretics- if they have some even highly improbable level of confidence that such a meaning could be applied to such a term. Yet even so, they are in mortal sin.

What about the dogma from Vatican I that we must accept dogmas "in the same sense and meaning by which they have always been defined". The question then becomes what is that same sense and meaning . The Church's teaching organ, outside of the infallible definition, is the ordinary and universal magisterium. Thus "same sense and meaning" which the Church has always held is that which every bishop has held its meaning to be. Thus same sense and meaning may actually include some apparently (to us) novel definitions on which Vatican II is based because, while it is not recorded, some bishop somewhere may have held the teaching if it is a remotely plausible definition of one of the dogmatic terms (even if the Roman Pontiff in his fallible exercises did not hold the proposition). The exercise of this back and forth play with definitions is easily seen with Cardinal Newman, who in his time attempt to interpret the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX in as liberal and broad a fashion as possible without doing violence to the dogma itself, but only to some of the ways you define some of the words in the dogma.

Now whether Newman was mortally sinning by defining terms in such a way that it went against the common consensus of the Fathers, Doctors, and ancient Bishops is quite another matter- and I would say it was quite likely he may have been skirting with mortal sin. But to say that he denied the dogmas themselves and was thus a heretic is just ridiculous.

The Dimonds- are just ridiculous.

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2007-05-12T23:32:00.000-07:00

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The Dimonds Are Dishonest

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