Pope Francis and the title of Our Lady as "Co-redemptrix" - Part 2 .... a reply to Fr. George David Byers

In my previous article, "Pope Francis and the title of Our Lady as "Co-redemptrix", I had requested that another blogger, Fr. Byers of Let Us Arise!, remove his erroneous attacks against Pope Francis. I had posted a quoted and corrected version of the message I had sent to him.

Fr. Byer did not approve that post as a reply to his blog. Instead he obliquely referred to my comments, playing off the fact that I am an architect, with another essay titled Co-Redemptrix unnecessary for faith? Un-architecting “relational signifiers”.

Suffice it to say, that Fr. Byer did not address anything of substance in terms of his errors of what the Holy Father actually said, nor even to the point of how a formal definition of "Co-Redemptrix"  might be "necessary for the Faith".  In fact, he didn't even attempt a mutually respectful discussion. Instead he engaged in straw man fallacies, multiple ad hominems, derision, sarcasm, and distortion.

And that's just in the first paragraph:

A rather anthropologically inhumane comment arrived to the blog stating “co-redemptrix as a title […] is not necessary for the faith,” and that “‘Co’ seems to be too strong of a relational signifier.” – That’s from a doctor of philosophy in theology, as it were, so to speak, who’s trying to architect Catholic faith with big words. Oooo! Big words! So, he says:

• The “‘Co’ [of co-redemptrix] seems to be too strong…”

I guess he’s a man of his time. Are we all supposed to be absolute individualists, with no “relational signifiers” that are, you know, too strong, nothing that would disturb our faith so much as to be, like, actually related to others, to God?
Bwahahahaha…. Sorry. This is actually sad.

He then set out on an indistinct path (by his own terms, a "rant") about the importance of "relational signifiers" -- a term he simultaneously derides and places in scare quotes while apparently accepting the validity and import of the words themselves.

The phrase must have stuck in his craw, since he spent quite a bit of energy describing (correctly as it happens to be) the relation we as baptized Catholics have with Our Lord, and the ways it is signified in Scripture: namely, that we are called to a process of identification with Christ -- divinization, or theosis.  But Fr. Byers never shows any Scriptural evidence that Our Lady acts as a co-redemptrix, nor that Scripture obviates any concerns about using the proper and correct relational signifiers.

Through out each of his scriptural quotes, he consistently shows how we are able to participate in the act of Christ because Christ took on our humanity to redeem us.  Nowhere does he get around to any actual objection to what I wrote, and in the middle of that, he apparently he agrees with me:

"Look. Christ is our Redeemer, alone. I know that."

Which of course is presumably the very reason that the Popes don't seem interested in trying to define "co-redemptrix", let alone make is a matter of declared dogma. Which was my point in the first place.  The Church properly avoids ambiguous language, especially in matters of Christology, which properly informs Mariology.

If Fr. Byers really knows that Christ alone is our Redeemer, and that any sense of The Blessed Virgin as "co-redemptrix" is by analogy, and that all analogy has limits, and that without a clear and precise dogmatic definition of what is to be intended and what is to be avoided by the term "co-redemptrix" that the use is subject to misunderstanding and may prove a stumbling block to ecumenism (and even so, it would probably still be subject to misunderstanding and prove a stumbling block), then I am not sure exactly what his complaint is with me.

I don't even know what the title of his latest blog post means, since he did not "unarchitect" anything but rather showed the importance of "relational signifiers", and he never made an argument for why declaring an infallible dogma of Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix was necessary for the Catholic Faith.

He evidently just thinks I'm some sort of Muslim or a prostitute or something...   

I have provided a screen shot of my reply to him, since I have no reason to think that he would approve this one either.