Another Modernist Text
Issued by Wm. Brown Co.

The Wm. Brown Company, Dubuque, Iowa, has received a great deal of criticism - and rightfully so - for daring to publish an horrendous sex education program for Catholic elementary school children.

Its 'New Creation' texts for grades 1-8 are simply the worst sexually explicit program directed at children that this reviewer has seen. Cardinal Edouard Gagnon, P.S.S., President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, has justifiably denounced it as "a travesty of sex education." The laity have found it incomprehensible that the 'New Creation' series carries the Imprimatur of a Catholic Bishop. Actually, it carries the Imprimaturs of two Archbishops.

The same incomprehensibility can be registered concerning another Wm. C. Brown Co. product, "In His Light: A Path Into Catholic Belief" authored by Rev. William A. Anderson and published in a revised edition (1986) with Imprimatur by the late Bishop Joseph H. Hodges, Bishop of Wheeling-Charleston who, the author declares "was open to the direction taken by the Church in the wake of the 2nd Vatican Council" (page iii).

Fr. Anderson himself states this "second edition offers the opportunity to express these new insights which have come from the experience of a living Church" (page vii), and recommends the volume as an ideal text to be used for the RCIA process (the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) which is in wide use.

He adds that his volume was written, moreover, "at the urging of the Evangelization Commission of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston (which) was looking for a book that would express in a simple fashion the developing thought in Catholic belief today." (page xi).

A number of doctrines of the Catholic Faith are man-handled in this work. I will refer here only to its Modernist treatment of Our Lord's Divinity and Humanity. Our divine Savior is denied the hypostatic union until after the Resurrection!

Fr. Anderson boldly writes:

• "At the Resurrection of Jesus, His human nature entered fully into union with His divine nature. He now received into His human nature the fullness of His Godhead with all its powers. (page 53)
• .... He had to live with the insecurity of searching for the correct words to share a message as perfectly as possible or the insecurity of wondering what tomorrow would bring, as we do, and that He lived by faith and feared suffering and death, as we do. In simplest terms, Jesus was human like us, yet still God. (page 49)
• ... At one point, Jesus professed a lack of knowledge about the end of the world. (page 49)
• Our author explains his bizarre teaching: "The fact that Jesus feared and suffered implies that Jesus 'emptied Himself' of the full experience of God's presence ... In the past, we often spoke of Jesus having the full and continual experience of God's presence." (page 49 - emphasis added)

In attempting to stress the true humanness of Christ, the author distorts miserably the revealed mystery of the hypostatic union whereby Christ's two natures, as Fr. John Hardon, S.J. has explained, "remain truly themselves and yet are bound together in a single divine personality."

"Christ is One Person, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. In becoming man, Christ was and remains true God, one in nature with the Father. When St. Paul speaks of God 'emptying himself' to become man, this does not mean that God somehow ceased to be God. "

(Hardon, "The Catholic Cathechism", page 140)

Wm.C.Brown Co.'s "In His Light: A Path Into Catholic Belief " volume with its caricature of an insecure, ignorant Jesus who "lived by faith" (obviously bereft of the Beatific Vision) presents a travesty of Vatican II' Christology. This volume may call Jesus Christ "God" but its heretical teaching renders impossible the defense of the Church's belief in the true Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.