The Deposit of Faith and the Priesthood

Rejection of the heresy of Modernism means rejection of its approach to the Deposit of Faith and Morals.

THE DEPOSIT OF FAITH AND THE PRIESTHOOD

By Eugene Kevane

The priesthood in this period since Vatican II, in the English-speaking world at least, is torn by a deep division. It is an incipient schism and more than a schism for it arises from a fundamental heresy with regard to the Deposit of Faith and Morals. This underlying cause of the present suffering of the Church needs to be uncovered and analyzed. Only by identifying and removing this cause can we priests of today help to heal it.

St. Paul uses the Greek word "paratheke," "deposit," meaning something precious entrusted to a depositary for safekeeping. He means by it not an inert object like gold or diamonds or a sum placed in the trust department of a bank, but a living body of doctrine. "O Timothy, guard the 'paratheke,' the deposit" (1 Tim. 6:20). This urgent appeal of the Apostle to his Successor is not only thematic for the "Acts of the Apostles" and their Epistles but also for the Gospels. The reason is the fact that this deposit is the doctrine and the teaching program which Jesus entrusted to his Apostles when he taught them, and mandated them to take it out to all nations (see Matt. 28:16-20). He entrusted it therefore also to their Successors, including the men of Holy Orders as a whole until his Second Coming at the end of the world. This concept of a priceless divine deposit entrusted to the teaching Church belongs to the New Testament as one of its principal themes.

The origin of the deposit, then, is Jesus the Divine Teacher. It originated in his teaching of his Apostles, when he prepared them to carry his program forth to all nations. What is the value of the deposit? Unique and priceless. Jesus himself states it: "My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me" (John 7:16). It is the Word of God, not diffused throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, but gathered into a brief teachable synthesis and summary by Jesus himself. It was a stroke of genius, humanly speaking, that Jesus made his revelation of the Three Divine Persons the pattern of this teachable summary of divine revelation. Jesus was preparing teachers in the age-old oral methods of mankind; printing, printed catechisms and printed textbooks were still fifteen centuries in the future.

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