Fundamental Articles

FUNDAMENTAL ARTICLES. - To indicate the truths of faith the Scholastics began to use the word "articles" instead of the older and more classical "sententiae." Thus the custom arose of calling the principal truths of revealed doctrine "articles of faith," and especially those contained in the Apostles' Creed or Credo.

But theologians do not agree in determining with precision the nature and the number of these articles; nor can one confine oneself to those contained in the Credo, because there is some important one, such as the Eucharist, of which no mention is made in it. Catholics therefore hold to a broad and generic concept, because they do not see in the question of the articles of faith a problem of special importance. Protestants, on the contrary, make much of it and have been discussing it for four centuries already, without having yet reached a definitive conclusion. They have always felt the need to fix certain fundamental truths, which might serve as a badge of recognition for the faithful of the true Church of Christ; but not having a supreme magisterium, the determination of those truths or articles of faith has always remained entrusted to individual arbitrariness, which is the dissolving acid of the entire Lutheran Reformation. Thus there have been numerous lists of articles, differing in content and in extent, but all agreeing in excluding those revealed truths that condemn Protestantism, such as, for example, the primacy of St. Peter. Now, neither Sacred Scripture nor tradition authorizes in the least a selection of the truths revealed by God, nor the discarding of any one of them: Revelation is either accepted as it is, and opens the way of salvation, or it is rejected entirely and heaven closes over our heads.

For this reason it was always easy for Catholics to refute, on the basis of Revelation and of the very spirit of Christianity, the claim of the Protestants. Christ presents the entire content of his Revelation as intangible and recommends to the apostles to transmit it as they received it: "Go and teach all nations... teaching them to observe all things (omnia quaecumque) that I have commanded you" (Mt. 28, 19-20). And history and the writings of the Fathers and doctors demonstrate the scrupulous care that the Church has always had in guarding whole and intact the divine deposit of Revelation.

Pietro Parente