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S i d e b a r
Pope Benedict and Trent
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This Rock
Volume 20, Number 7
 September-October 2009 
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Pope Benedict teaches, "Paul is primarily concerned to show that faith in Christ is necessary and sufficient" (Audience, Nov. 26). Someone familiar with traditional apologetics might ask, "Doesn’t St. James teach that faith without works is dead (Jas 2:26) and does not justify (Jas 2:24)"? The Holy Father knows these verses well: "James accentuates the consequential relations between faith and works" (Nov. 26). That is, "Faith that is active in love testifies to the freely given gift of justification in Christ" (Nov. 26). Compare these statements with Trent: "If anyone says that . . . [good] works themselves are solely fruits and signs of justification received, and not also a cause of its increase, let him be anathema" (Trent, VI, canon 24).
Finally, Benedict underscores "the insignificance of our actions and of our deeds to achieve salvation" (Nov. 26). Elsewhere, he states, "We cannot—to use the classical expression—‘merit’ Heaven through our works" (Spe Salvi, 35). If we turn to Trent, we hear,
If anyone says that the good works of the justified man are gifts of God in such a way that they are not also the good merits of the justified himself, or that the justified person, by the good works he performs through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ (whose living member he is), does not truly merit an increase in grace, eternal life, the attainment of eternal life itself (if he dies in grace), and even an increase in glory, let him be anathema. (Trent, VI, canon 32)
It is of first importance to stress the continuity of the faith. As Paul VI indicated and as Pope Benedict XVI indicates, the Second Vatican Council, as all post-conciliar teaching, must be read according to a hermeneutic of continuity. That hermeneutic demands as its bedrock a solid knowledge of Tradition and as its lifeblood a suppleness grounded in attention to the real, to what the rule of faith tells us.
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