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The catholic dogma was interpreted this way at the time of the Council of Florence (see also Dante), but it stopped to be long before Vatican II. For example:
John Carroll, first bishop of the US.
For the protestant, I don't get it. I was taught that they believe in fate, so that your salvation was decided by God before your birth and your actions don't matter, but I'm no expert.
You can't "reinterpret" defined dogma. That's what defining a dogma means.
As for the dogma itself:
With regards to John Carroll, of course he's going to be wishy-washy like that. Maryland is surrounded by protestants. If he went around telling people they had to swear allegiance to the pope to be saved, the Establishment Clause might have been under some early pressure.
Well it was also the opinion of vatican II that everyone could be saved on his own merits, if they did not reject jesus. So it seems that you can actually reinterpret dogma, because that's what vatican II did. Just like the catholic church always had a dogma that you could not make money from money, yet there are catholic bankers now.
Let's say that person A asserts both that X, and that no future interpreters may gainsay X.
Then a century later, person B asserts both that not X, and that future interpreters may contradict A.
If both A and B are church leaders, it would be easy to say that B is simply mistaken. However, I think a better way to look at it may be that there are two separate churches, "A-type catholicism" and "B-type catholicism".
(If however B-types then go around asserting that they are and have always been A-types, we may have a problem.)
I think it's a little more complicated that, since Catholics are loath to admit that the dogma has actually changed.
What's actually going on is that they're reinterpreting X so that they don't have to agree with the actual sentiment, so that they can affirm X while denying what X was originally supposed to mean.
As was pointed out elsewhere, that's kind of hard to reconcile with some of the things said in Vatican I about reinterpretation not being okay, but there are sort of ways to get around that, via what seems like it's quite possibly a reinterpretation.
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It depends how you define catholicism, but it seems to me that there is in practice only one type of catholicism. They recognize the same pope, they go to the same churches. That is why you can actually reinterpret dogmas, even if you said you couldn't. Because the dogmas are defined by the catholic community, not the other way.
Who exactly are "the catholic community"? There's a lot of variance out there.
And why does that allow reinterpretation? I'm afraid I'm not following.
The catholic community is the set of people that go the the same churches, that recognize the same pope, that have the same theology courses (be it catechism or university courses). Obviously you can ask whether south america catholics are really in the same community as rome catholics, but catholicism is heavily centralized and ultimately it's the pope who chooses the priests everywhere (through the bishops and the cardinals). If you recognize the priest the pope has chosen for you, you are a member of the community.
It allows reinterpretation because in practice it does not change the community to reinterpret. People won't leave the churches, they won't stop recognizing the priests. In fact, some might: some communities do not recognize vatican II, but they are very small minorities that do not matter much. Most catholics aren't theology nerds and the point of catholicism is that they don't have to. Knowing the dogmas and reading the bible is good for the priests, but the people just have to follow what the priests say. So why would they care if the dogmas change?
Because Christianity is a religion that concerns itself with truth, not merely unity. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Being protestant, I suppose I do not object to your considering previous people wrong, as long as you are willing to admit that they were wrong, and that the pope is not infallible. What cannot be allowed is a change in true doctrine, only a change in what is considered to be true.
In any case, considering that there are people who reject Vatican II but recognize the pope, how do you determine what the current teaching is? Just what the pope says? Is you're saying that those against Vatican II are small and irrelevant to say that truth is determined just by the size of the party?
For the record, I'm not really a christian, I'm just telling you how I understand it from (almost) outside.
If I cut your arm, what is "you" after the cut? Yourself, or your cut arm? I was made to chant "we are the body of the christ, each of us is a member of this body". It's pretty clear, isn't it?
The size of the party, or the pope, do not matter. What matters is that the community remains functional if you remove a part of it. Sure, it will be less functional if you split it in half or if the pope is heretic, because that would have important consequences on the functionality of the church.
As I said Christians say that they are concerned by truth, but it does not mean they actually are. Yes, the protestant churches are organized in such a way that communities split if they don't have the same faith. So perhaps the protestants are more concerned by the truth than the catholics. But it can't really work. There is no practical way to discover the truth, as proved by the number of protestant churches. You can say if you wish that god will lead you toward the truth, but then you have to explain why God leads so few people toward it, even among the protestant. Making religion about faith and truth is deemed to disolve it. Ultimately everyone will have his own beliefs and there will be no religion at all.
The catholic way, to stick together and let the hierarchy decide what must be believed seems a bit dishonest, but at least it's not provably false that God leads the Catholic church as a whole toward the truth. Sure, individual belivers might be false (perhaps even all of them), but at the end of the day the Church will remain and improve. And as catholics care more about charity than about faith, it's not even that important if it happens that they are mistaken for all of their life. Remember that charity is love, and love is what make people want to live together and seek unity.
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Ah, revealed-preference dogma. :)
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I agree with you. But that reads to me like it's contradicted by some of the things that Vatican II says about tradition in Dei Verbum, along the lines of Newman.
I think there are ways to get out of some of that—Bellarmine thought that only the canons and other select parts of councils are infallible, I believe, and what you cited first wouldn't fall under that.
But there is the following from Dei Filius, which is an anathema, so everyone would agree that it's infallible:
Unfortunately, that particular statement is a little ambiguous—the argument could be made (I think it might be unclear, there are features in the text of Dei Filius that could support either interpretation), that that anathema, when it has the word here translated as knowledge (scientia in latin), refers to non-theological sciences like psychology, not to theology.
I would prefer that it were less ambiguous, since I have Catholic friends to argue against who like the idea of development of dogma, but that's how it goes.
(Also, someone else attempting to use the set of texts you pointed out to argue a formerly Catholic friend into more anti-Vatican II beliefs did result in that person leaving Roman Catholicism)
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Given the last canon of Dei Filius of Vatican I, it's at least questionable to me whether you should be able reinterpret dogmas like that (although I haven't actually read any Roman Catholic scholars to see how they approach that canon of Vatican I—it probably is a little ambiguous).
Well, I'm not sure how settled it was. Maybe he was trying to do something else, but the following from the Syllabus of Errors from 1864 at least reads as intending to prohibit some of what Carroll was there affirming (although maybe there's some other way to take it):
(those were condemned by Pius IX)
At this time, not all protestants really have a doctrine of predestination, but they should. Like under Thomas' understanding, you're predestined, but you also are condemned because of your own actions.
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In my experience only some Protestants believe that (notably Calvinists). Though, I also like the explanation I've read from Catholics. God exists outside of time, so he sees all of your life in one instant, like a single endless now. Therefore he knows what will happen, but you have free will nonetheless.
I realize that not everyone will jive with that explanation, but I personally rather like that one.
Right, I think that might end up being isomorphic to the Molinist interpretation, depending on how things fit into that. You still have to account for how any of that relates to God. Is it all dependent upon God's will in some way? Is any aspect of it independent? God being eternal doesn't make all the problems go away, since I would image there would still be some doctrine of providence.
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I'm pretty sure Luther did not believe in free will, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Bondage_of_the_Will
It seems to me that for the catholics God knows (before your birth) if you will be saved, while for the protestants (at least those who don't believe in free will), God decides it.
Actually, that depends on the Catholic in question. The two predominant ideas on predestination are the Molinistic and the Thomistic views, I believe. Thomas Aquinas would see God as predestining, while Molina sort of would. (Predestinating which choices are instantiated, but not the output of the choices themselves, if I understand it correctly.)
Dominicans vs. Jesuits.
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