Following the vision of Vatican II

Father, you are probably on the wrong chat list - most of us believe the Second Vatican Council needs to be interpreted in the light of tradition and saved from the so-called liberals who attempted to monopolise it for the past four decades. But if it makes you feel better, you can read another rant from everybody's favourite agnostic, Patsy McGarry, in today's Irish Times: www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0418/1224314874708.html

This morning's Times also has an interesting Vampire supplement commemorating the centenary of Bram Stoker's death.

I notice Patsy McGarry does not even bother to say what he thinks is wrong with Pope Benedict's views and why: he just lists them as if they were self-evidently outrageous:
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Pope Benedict’s views were well-known, as were his attitudes to dissent. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger helped to force closed many windows thrown open by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.

For instance, where ecumenism was concerned and in his infamous Dominus Iesus document of 2000, he dismissed all reformed churches as not churches “in the proper sense”. They were merely “ecclesial communities”. THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE VATICAN II DOCUMENTS All other faiths were “gravely deficient”. In 1997, he described Buddhism as an “auto-erotic spirituality”. Hinduism was based on a concept of reincarnation resembling “a continuous circle of hell”. THIS IS A PERFECTLY REASONABLE CRITICISM OF THE DOCTRINE OF KARMA UNDERLYING REINCARNATION - THIS IS THE SAME PATSY MCGARRY WHO CRITICISES ORTHODOX CATHOLICISM FOR LACKING COMPASSION?

On celibacy, women priests or women in the diaconate, he was immovable. Similarly on the use of condoms even to combat Aids. On homosexuality he was virulent. In 1986, he described it as a “strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”.

Where dissent was concerned he brooked no hostages. It extended to former colleagues such as Hans Küng. In 1966, at Küng’s instigation, the Catholic faculty at Germany’s Tübingen university appointed Fr Ratzinger professor of dogmatics. In 1979, Küng was stripped of his licence to teach because he challenged papal infallibility. HE HAS CHALLENGED A LOT MORE THAN PAPAL INFALLIBILITY - ESSENTIALLY HE IS NO LONGER A CHRISTIAN BECAUSE HE DOES NOT BELIEVE JESUS IS UNIQUE - HE'S A KANTIAN THEIST. MARTIN GARDNER, THE WELL-KNOWN MATHEMATICAL WRITER, SAID HE BELIEVES EXACTLY WHAT KUNG BELIEVES, HE DOESN'T SEE HOW KUNG CAN BELIEVE IT AND STILL CALL HIMSELF A CATHOLIC, AND HE THINKS THE CHURCH WAS QUITE CORRECT IN DISCIPLINING KUNG In 1981, when Ratzinger became dean of the CDF, he upheld that decision.

In 1986, he stopped US priest Fr Charles Curran from teaching because of his views on sexuality and ethics. FR CURRAN IS TEACHING IN A METHODIST UNIVERSITY AND STILL POPS UP TO PRAISE THE ACP A Brazilian, Fr Leonardo Boff, was silenced twice by him, in 1985 and in 1991. Fr Robert Nugent and Sr Jeannine Gramick, who worked with gay people in the US, were sanctioned in 1999. In 1995, Sri Lankan theologian Fr Tissa Belasuriya was excommunicated by him over writings on Mary, original sin and the divinity of Christ. He was later reconciled with the church.

There were so many more...
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I note he treats all these disciplinings as if they were done by Cardinal Ratzinger of his own arbitrary will, not after a process of examination, discernment and dialogue involving deliberate refusal to modify their views.

Of course he is playing to their prejudices - the worrying thing is that these prejudices are now so deeply entrenched he can just blow the dog whistle.
Picking up the fallacies in his statements is IMHO a great way of morale building which may perhaps influence a few people whom the IRISH TIMES have not yet succeeded in teaching not to think.

Re the Catechism - please read this article by Scriputre scholar Fr Brendan Byrne s.j.:

www.v2catholic.com/background/2012/2012-01-18byrne.htm - especially the final section

Comments can be put at bottom of article

God bless dear people who have read/responded to my original post!

Interesting article on the CATHOLIC HERALD blog:

www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/09/05/as-the-church-prepares-for-the-50th-anniversary-of-vatican-ii-i-ask-what-did-pope-john-hope-for-also-what-unites-hans-kung-and-daphne-mcleod/

Indeed. There are several demonstrable inaccuracies. The statement that Pius XII "always resisted calling a Council" is misleading - he had preparatory work done on calling one but finally decided against it on the grounds that it was best left to a successor. While John XXIII saw Vatican II as dealing with unfinished business from Vatican I, he had something more in mind than a simple continuation of Vatican I, or otherwise he would just have reconvened the earlier Council (as Pius XI considered doing after the Lateran Pact) instead of making it clear this was a new one. (Resuming the same council 90 years later would have been unusual, but there was a precedent given that there were gaps of more than a decade between some of the sessions of Trent.)
It was Cardinal Ottaviani, not Archbishop Lefebvre who oversaw the preparation of the schemata rejected at Vatican II; given that Archbishop Lefebvre was a missionary bishop and not a curialist it would have been odd to have him so centrally involved. (BTW I have just been reading Fr Stanley Jaki's reprint of Cardinal Manning's little book on Vatican I and Manning, in defending the declaration on infallibility as the free decision of the Council Fathers, emphasises that in a General Council the Fathers are absolutely entitled to amend the schemata offered by the preparatory commissions, or to reject them altogether and call for new ones. So that Fathers at Vatican II were absolutely within their rights to do as they did, whether they were altogether wise is another matter.)
The image of a thriving and expanding Church before Vatican II is very much an English view (combination of Irish and other Catholic immigration, the movement of significant numbers of Catholics from working-class backgrounds into the middle classes through education, the decline of old-style No-Popery, and a strong Catholic cultural presence partly through the factors already mentioned and partly through the persistence of the cohesive 'Roman' Catholic identity/organisation formed in the nineteenth century).
In Italy, France and Germany by the late 1950s there was already serious concern that the church was losing out to a combination of old-style anti-clericalism and the new consumer society; in America and Australia expansion was accompanied by significant liberal-conservative disputes, though the liberals were usually recognisably and even proudly Catholic in a way they were not a couple of decades later. In both these countries the divide was seen at least partly as between an old-style Irish immigrant church - working-class, authoritarian -and a more confident Australian or American Catholicism led by university-educated (middle-class) professionals. (The priests played by Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby in GOING MY WAY are a version of this divide, and remember that film was made in 1944. One of the big ironies is that one of the signs of Crosby's modernity is that he plays golf, whereas in the 1960s and 70s the golf-playing suburban pastor was one of the favourite targets of "radical Catholic" denunciation.)
It is, as has often been pointed out, very revealing that while the Irish bishops in the 1940s and 1950s believed the near-universal observance of Mass and the Sacraments in Ireland showed they were a cut above the Continentals and had a model of Catholicism which successfully dealt with the problems of modernity, at the Council they proved completely unable to articulate such a model let alone defend it.
So Daphne McLeod is quite right in highlighting what has been lost, but OTT in the view that the debacle would not have happened without the Council. In my opinion it is arguable that the Church might have survived better if the Council had not happened when it did, but it could also have done worse (for example, quite a lot of trads in the 60s and 70s regarded Franco's Spain as representing the ideal of church-state relations, and I don't see how clinging to THAT model could have ended happily). The consumer society and the 60s upheavals in society would have happened even without the Council.

www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/1567/time_is_short_eternity_is_long.aspx
Ignatius Insight has some thoughts for the upcoming 50th anniversary of the convening of the Council on 11 October - for which we can no doubt expect much on the theme of "Vatican II Betrayed" from Garry O'Sullivan, Old Uncle Patsy, the ACPI and all. Note in particular the point that John XXIII was by no means a Pollyanna expecting that all in the modern world would henceforth be rosy:
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• "Today the Church is witnessing a crisis under way within society." So wrote Blessed John XXIII in his apostolic constitution “Humanae Salutis” (December 25, 1961), announcing the convocation of an unexpected ecumenical Council. John XXIII is sometimes presented a simple, even naive, man, or as a closet progressive, or as a pontiff who was simply winging it under the influence of the Holy Spirit (or, as some on the far reaches might insist, under the influence of the Spirit of the Age). None of those impressions or depictions are accurate.

John XXIII was a man of tremendous faith whose love for Christ and His Church are obvious in his words and actions. His affiable disposition reflected that faith, but he was not naive about the state of the world. After all, he had spent almost all of his adult life as a diplomat in predominately non-Catholic countries, often dealing with the most delicate and tense situations, such as helping save the lives of countless Jews and others during the 1930s and '40s as an apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece, not to mention being Apostolic Nuncio to France during the final months of World War II. He had witnessed the darkest moments of Europe in the mid-20th century, and he was willing to squarely face the potential dangers of the latter half of the century:

While humanity is on the edge of a new era, tasks of immense gravity and amplitude await the Church, as in the most tragic periods of its history. It is a question in fact of bringing the modern world into contact with the vivifying and perennial energies of the gospel, a world which exalts itself with its conquests in the technical and scientific fields, but which brings also the consequences of a temporal order which some have wished to reorganise excluding God. This is why modern society is earmarked by a great progress to which there is not a corresponding advance in the moral field.

October 11th of this year marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Much will be written and said about the Council: good, bad, insightful, confusing, brilliant, stupid, and otherwise. There will be countless pieces about the "conservatives" and the "liberals", about how the Council ruined the Church, about why the Council unleashed a "Spirit" that subsequent pontiffs have destroyed, and so forth. My modest suggestion—hardly an original or outrageous one—is to read the documents of the Council, especially the four Dogmatic and Pastoral Constitutions. And be sure to read “Humanae Salutis”, as it sets the table for the feast that are the major documents of the Council—a feast that far too many Catholics either ignore, snitch from for their own dubious agendas, or dismiss because they wrongly attribute the often ugly post-conciliar upheaval to the teachings of the Council. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the closing of the Council gave some advice that is just as applicable today as it was in 1985:

I believe . . . that the true time of Vatican II has not yet come, that its authentic reception has not yet begun: its documents were quickly buried under a pile of superficial or frankly inexact publications. The reading of the letter of the documents will enable us to discover their true spirit. If thus rediscovered in their truth, those great texts will make it possible for us to understand just what happened and to react with a new vigor. I repeat: the Catholic who clearly and, consequently, painfully perceives the damage that has been wrought in his Church by the misinterpretations of Vatican II must find the possibility of revival in Vatican II itself. The Council is his, it does not belong to those who want to continue along a road whose results have been catastrophic.” (The Ratzinger Report, p. 40).

• A bit more from Blessed John XXIII: "The forthcoming Council will meet therefore and at a moment in which the Council finds very alive the desire to fortify its faith, and to contemplate itself in its own awe-inspiring unity. In the same way, it feels more urgent the duty to give greater efficacy to its sound vitality and to promote the sanctification of its members, the diffusion of revealed truth, the consolidation of its agencies." Note the key words: faith, unity, vitality, sanctification, revealed truth. They each are key themes of the Council...
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