The Deposit of Faith: What the Catholic Church Really Believes

There is a structure of universal history, foreseen by the Prophets, and a structure of the Christian Era, the concluding phase of universal history, likewise foreseen by the prophets, and especially by Jesus.  What is the source and cause of this structure?  It is the Deposit of Faith and Morals.  The active teaching of its revealed truths and the vicissitudes of our human response to it form the dynamic cause.  It is time now to conclude with a concise review of these things which we have seen in the preceding chapters.

The Heresy of Modernism sees nothing of this structure.  For it the landscape of history is a flat and unrelieved upward march of Christianity by accommodating to the successive cultural situation of history. “The teaching of faith,” so they think, “which  God has revealed, has been proposed as a philosophical discovery to be perfected by human ingenuity.”1   With Protestantism it adopts Porphyry’s view of Daniel as a mere account of a history that ended with the Greeks.  It recognizes no Deposit, sees no apostasy from it in modern times, and expects no Antichrist.  For the Catholic Church the truth is quite different: “The teaching of  faith, which God has revealed, has been proposed as a divine Deposit handed over to the Spouse of Christ to be guarded faithfully and to be explained infallibly.  Hence that meaning of sacred dogmas must perpetually be retained which Holy Mother Church has once declared; nor is that meaning ever to be abandoned under the pretext and name of a more profound comprehension.”2   This, then, is the cause of the structure which the Christian mind sees in history.  It is the Deposit of Faith and Morals, understood always in that unchangeable meaning of its Articles of Faith which the living Magisterium guards with its dogmas.

A review of the salient features of this structure, together with the role of the Deposit of Faith and Morals which has brought it into being, is in order.  First, the structure of the universal history of mankind:  We recall that this was foretold by the Prophet Daniel in the immense panorama of the succession of the Four Empires.  John Henry Newman is our best guide  in this matter.  His heroic virtues have been proclaimed by the Church, so that we may call him Venerable Cardinal Newman.  We saw his teaching in Chapter Nine; let us look at it again.3  “As Rome,” he writes, “according to the Prophet Daniel’s vision, succeeded Greece, so Antichrist succeeds Rome, and the Second Coming succeeds Antichrist.  But it does not hence follow that Antichrist is come: for it is not clear that the Roman Empire is gone.  Far from it:  the Roman Empire in the view of prophecy, remains to this day.”4 

What is Newman saying? He means that the Roman Empire did not end when the line of pagan Emperors ceased to rule it.  It was converted to the Catholic Church, as we have seen, becoming the Christian Rome of St. Peter and Paul.  Under Peter’s Successor, the new Roman Pontifex, it continued to rule the nations by the Catholic Faith, exercising a wider control than that of the previous pagan Rome with its marching legions.  “It is difficult to say whether the Roman Empire is gone or not,” Newman continues later on; “in one sense it is gone, for it is divided into kingdoms; in another sense, it is not, for the date cannot be assigned at which it came to an end, and much might be said in various ways to show that it may be considered still existing, though in a mutilated and decayed state.”5 

What Newman is seeing is the fact that the Christian Roman Empire did not continue vigorously beyond about a thousand years.  Since then it has suffered the growing apostasy of men and nations, beginning in early modern times.  A vast translatio imperii (“transference of power)” has been taking place, moving gradually through the Heresy of Protestantism, the French Revolution, and the spread of modern atheism.  No one has perceived this fact of a growing apostasy in modern times better than Newman.  “What I have said upon this subject,” he writes, “may be summed up as follows:  – that the coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by a very awful and unparalleled outbreak of evil, called by St. Paul an Apostasy, a falling away, in the midst of which a certain man of sin and Child of perdition, the special and singular enemy of Christ, or Antichrist, will appear.”  Newman is commenting on St. Paul in 2 Thess. 2:3-4.  “The man of sin,” he continues, “is born of an Apostasy, or at least comes into power through an apostasy, or is preceded by an apostasy, or would not be except for an apostasy.”6