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Post by guillaume on Jan 29, 2009 16:01:34 GMT
An article and opinion from Geral Warner : blogs.telegraph.co.uk/gerald_warner/blog/2009/01/27/fifty_years_on_time_to_revisit_and_reform_the_second_vatican_catastropheBenedict XVI grows in stature as his reign progresses. To the momentous achievement of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, freeing the Tridentine Mass, he has now added the sagacious and just lifting of the excommunications imposed on the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X. Although there was widespread scepticism about the validity of those censures, their lifting removes a roadblock to the restoration of the Church after the damage wrought by the Second Vatican Catastrophe. Not everyone is happy about the pardoning of the bishops. The staff of The Tablet are rumoured to be on suicide watch, while the malign spirit of those who, without any conscious irony, denominate themselves "liberals" was well illustrated by Gianni Gennari, an Italian journalist. Gennari is a laicized priest, now married. Fighting back tears, he responded to news of the lifting of the excommunications: "It is a tragedy, the complete debacle of the Church!... I am disappointed, stunned, scandalised... In this case there is no place for the mercy of Christ"... Of course not. The Modernists have always excluded from any kind of mercy those faithful Catholics who adhere unreservedly to the Deposit of Faith. Anything that reduces the likes of Gennari to tears has to be good news. Over the past few days, some blinkeredly optimistic souls have been trying - without much real hope - to persuade Catholics to "celebrate" the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the Second Vatican Council. This was the great "renewal", when the Holy Ghost inspired the Church to aggiornamento, or modernisation. What form has that Renewal taken?In England and Wales in 1964, at the end of the Council, there were 137,673 Catholic baptisms; in 2003 the figure was 56,180. In 1964 there were 45,592 Catholic marriages, in 2003 there were 11,013. Mass attendance has fallen by 40 per cent. In "Holy" Ireland, only 48 per cent of so-called Catholics go to Mass. In France, there were 35,000 priests in 1980; today there are fewer than 19,000. Renewal? In the United States, in 1965, there were 1,575 priestly ordinations; in 2002 there were 450 - a 350 per cent decline. In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians, in 2002 just 4,700. Today 15 per cent of US parishes are without priests. Only 25 per cent of America's nominal Catholics attend Mass. Worse still is the erosion of faith among those who ludicrously describe themselves as Catholics. Among US Catholics aged 18-44 (the children of Vatican II) as many as 70 per cent say they believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Christ. To describe this unprecedented collapse of the Church as "renewal" is insane; to attribute it to the operation of the Holy Ghost is blasphemous. The Catholic Church is in the same position as an alcoholic: until it admits to the problem, no cure is possible. The problem is Vatican II.Pope Benedict himself has expressed reservations about at least one Council document. The only remotely celebratory response to the Council's 50th anniversary would be to appoint a commission of orthodox theologians to scrutinise all of Vatican II's documents and correct their errors. It is time to revisit and reform this council that has brought forth such poisonous fruits.Agreed : oh yes !
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Post by Noelfitz on Jan 29, 2009 21:10:31 GMT
Guillaume,
You wrote about "Second Vatican Catastrophe".
You are brave to be so explicit. I wonder are you correct. The Holy Spirit is meant to guide the Church.
Some time ago at a meeting about the success of Vat II I mentioned a point similar to yours. Prior to Vat II churches were full now they are almost empty.
I was told without Vat II it would be worse - churches would be more empty.
Perhaps prayer can help.
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Post by guillaume on Jan 29, 2009 23:39:35 GMT
Guillaume, You wrote about "Second Vatican Catastrophe". You are brave to be so explicit. I wonder are you correct. The Holy Spirit is meant to guide the Church. Some time ago at a meeting about the success of Vat II I mentioned a point similar to yours. Prior to Vat II churches were full now they are almost empty. I was told without Vat II it would be worse - churches would be more empty. Perhaps prayer can help. I did not write this article ! Follow the link. God Bless.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 30, 2009 13:23:41 GMT
This article strikes me as very questionable. Firstly, it does not distinguish between the Council and its implementation. General Councils of the Church are divinely safeguarded from error. Who are the "orthodox" theologians who he wants to go over the Council documents and correct their errors; how is their "orthodoxy" to be defined? Secondly, I can see at least two logical fallacies. The first is "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Saying that anything which liberals hate must be good is like saying that the Nazis hated communism, therefore communism must be good, or vice versa. The second fallacy is "post hoc ergo propter hoc" - because B follows A A must have caused B. Vatican II followed various internal reform movements going back long before Pius XII (indeed Pius XII made significant changes in the Easter liturgy, for example, and he considered calling a general council in the early 1950s but decided that in the post-war crisis the time was not ripe) and it reflected a sense that the postwar religious revival was proving to be shallowly based and needed to be rethought/further developed. Such features as the transformation of the German and Italian Christian Democrat parties (initially seen as the basis of social reform) into corrupt parties of consumer culture were already well under way by the late 1950s.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 2, 2010 9:55:54 GMT
Different takes on SACROSANCTUM CONCILIUM, the Vatican II Constitution on the Liturgy. Fr Zuhlsdorf maintains it is "wholly ours" basically a conservative document which does not mandate the radical changes which actually happened, and can be cited to support a 'reform of the reform' position. His comboxers argue this out: wdtprs.com/blog/2010/08/wholly-ours/Christopher Ferrara argues that Bugnini was the principal author of SC and that it is devised to be so full of loopholes ("Wholly Emmentaler" - i.e. full of holes, like cheese) that any changes however radical can be justified by reference to it. He argues that it should be explicitly repudiated by the Church. www.latin-mass-society.org/ferrara.htmRorate Caeli combox debate on Ferrara: www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19978542&postID=7088681217653118787A couple of points occur to me about Ferrara's position - I suspect his account of Bugnini's motives may be accurate, but Ferrara writes like a lawyer arguing to his brief - he assumes his own rightness and picks holes in the other side's argument. He seems to take it for granted that it was undesirable to have any change at all (in this, oddly enough, he is arguing from the same perspective as those who maintain that the TLM ought to be suppressed because, they argue, tolerating it implies reform was unnecessary) and that the only acceptable solution would be suppression of the NO and universal return to the TLM. Furthermore, he seems to assume that centralised direction of liturgical matters from Rome and uniformity of rites are a good thing in themselves, even though (a) the former is a fairly recent development (b) the idea that Rome could introduce any changes it liked by central fiat was one of the things that led to the imposition of the NO, the delegitimation of any criticism, and our current liturgical Mass (c) his arguments in favour of liturgical uniformity as good in itself seem logically to lead to the view that only the Roman Liturgy should be tolerated and that the eastern rites should be suppressed. (This was actually advocated by some people in the early twentieth century - for example, it is presented as highly desirable in RH Benson's novel LORD OF THE WORLD). Any thoughts on this dispute.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 30, 2011 8:22:01 GMT
I don't understand the mindset here at all (Desmond Fisher's letter). Is he saying that VII has not been implemented and we are still obeying, praying and paying? www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2011/1230/1224309631256.htmlSir, – The correspondence on the Catholic Spring seems to be concentrating on the subject of married priests or women priests. The implied assumption is that changing the relevant Canon Law provisions concerning the priesthood will, like our present freak weather, get us through the winter of discontent in the Catholic Church and bring us to a new and glorious spring. Such wishful thinking misinterprets the nature of the dissatisfaction of those Catholics who are concerned about the present state of their church and wish to improve it. Changing rules is not the answer. Catholics generally and Irish Catholics in particular have been taught that good religious behaviour consists in obeying rules. That is the Old Testament mindset that Jesus condemned in the Pharisees. He came on earth to see us free. He had only two rules – love God and love your neighbour. However, throughout the two millenniums of the church’s existence, rules – and the threatened consequences of breaking them – have been the mechanism by which church authorities have exercised their control over ordinary Catholics. Our duty, as one bishop told the Council, has been seen as “to obey, to pray and to pay”. Obedience to rules does nothing to produce change in a person. Christ’s wish is, by his reaching and his example, to change each of us so that we, in turn, will change the world in what God wants the world to be. He is inviting each of us to be co-Redeemers with him and to change the world by our example in our family, our community, our workplace. This is one of the most significant teachings of Vatican 2. It is the blueprint for the Catholic Spring that the Council gave us 50 years ago when it described us as the People of God. When are we going to claim our inheritance? – Yours, etc, Desmond Fisher. Lovely letter following by a Michael Kelly stating that Catholics don't go to Mass and stay Catholics because it makes us feel nice. Sir, – Catholicism is evidently one of only very few institutions or belief systems that one can pour scorn on with apparent impunity and without reference to facts. In his letter encouraging restive Catholics to abandon their faith and join the Church of Ireland (December 29th), Greg Scanlon patronisingly refers to what he describes as “Rome’s need for control and lack of respect for human dignity” without attempting to employ any evidence to back up his spurious claims. If the Catholic faith was so glibly dismissed by a firebrand fundamentalist Protestant preacher well-known for rants against “Popery” the attack would rightly be seen as anti-Catholic and lacking in substance. Further, Mr Scanlon might reflect on the fact that for many Catholics their home in the Catholic Church is based on the truth of its message rather than on finding a denomination that suits one’s own feelings and patterns of behaviour. – Yours, etc, MICHAEL P KELLY, Inchicore Road, Dublin 8. I still don't understand why the first letter writer thinks that we're all Papist peasants bowing to the clergy as they walk by, what planet is he on? On rereading that co-Redeemer stuff can I see a problem with authority and the priesthood there.. is he an ACP sympathiser? I agree VII wasn't implemented properly but we've hardly remained as we were before the Council, can anyone understand his point of view and translate it for me??
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 30, 2011 15:49:49 GMT
Mr Fisher's view is essentially that Vatican II implies that the idea that the clergy have any sort of separate teaching authority or sacramental role which the laity do not possess is simply a con-job perpetrated to secure power for the clergy and for no other reason, and that we should all do whatever we feel like doing (with the unstated assumption that we will in practice do what he feels we should do) since Jesus would not want us to do anything we find difficult or unpleasant. Any obligation which we find difficult or unpleasant (looking after aged relatives, abstaining from self-gratification etc) cannot in this view by definition come from Jesus. Another way of putting it would be to say that the Church should not be seen as the Mystical Body of Christ - something in its own right deriving from and created by Jesus - but as an association of individuals, which ought to claim no more authority over any of these individuals than that individual chooses to give it. The ACp has a similar mindset but it is so widespread among "liberals" that it does not indicate that the person enunciating it is an ACPI supporter.
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Post by hythlodaye on Jan 5, 2012 22:27:41 GMT
I think this Des Fisher used to be editor of the Catholic Herald in the early 1960s, when the CH was frenetically progressive. He had earlier been on the Irish Press, and I believe before that he was a seminarian. He was then appointed Deputy Head of News in RTE, where he liked to quote Marshal McLuhan on "audio-visual culture". Des was once heard to express admiration for hippies and yippies. He was every inch a spirit of Vatican II man, like Kevin O'Kelly, RTE Religious Affairs Correspondent at the time. When Brendan Corish appointed Conor Cruise O'Brien as deputy leader of the Labour Party, the RTE Head of News, (now the late) Jim McGuinness remarked at an editorial conference in Des Fisher's presence: "That wasn't very wise of Corish: I'd NEVER appoint a man as intelligent as O'Brien as MY deputy." If it's the same Des Fisher, he's obviously learned absolutely nothing in the last half century. He must by now be well into his 80s.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 24, 2012 12:40:00 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 24, 2012 22:57:54 GMT
Mr Fisher's article is essentially an account of what he presents as the two great moments of the modern Church - John XXIII's announcement of his decision to call the Second Vatican Council and the rejection of the schemata prepared by the Curia. Clearly he presents these as key moments in a "hermeneutic of rupture" interpretation - he presents them implicitly as marking a decisive break after which all previous precedents become inoperative. A few points come to mind. First, his "take" on Bl. John's decision is oddly enough identical to that of Michael Davies, writing from a moderate LEfebvrist perspective in the 1980s. Both present the decision as coming out of a clear sky, as if nobody had previously had the slightest idea of calling a General Council - except that where Fisher implicitly presents this abruptness as indicating the work of the Holy Spirit, Davies presents it as indicating a mental aberration (and I have seen trads - I think in the present-day CHRISTIAN ORDER - who attribute it to the intervention of the Devil!) This takes on a somewhat different complexion when it is realised that after the Lateran Pact consideration was quite widely given to reconvening Vatican I (which broke off before it could complete its scheduled tasks) or to holding a new Council, and that Pius XII put considerable work into planning a new Council before deciding that this was a task best left to his successor. Secondly, Fisher attributes the conservatism of the Curial cardinals to blind institutional self-protection, with the implication that the same is true of the present-day Curia, but he fails to discuss the motivations and beliefs of the "liberals", whose rightness is thus presented as self-evident and equated with Fisher's own views. (It is years since I read Wiltgen's THE RHINE FLOWS INTO THE TIBER, but his point that they reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations of a group of bishops and theologians from the Rhine countries is certainly worth considering if you want to get a perspective on them - especially given the extent to which they acted as an organised caucus and thus had a head start on the more conservative bishops who had tended to trust the Curia to keep matters in hand.) Furthermore it is certainly not the case that all the "conservatives" were Curial (Archbishop Lefebvre, for example, was never a Curia member, and the Irish diocesan bishops were generally pretty conservative) or for that matter that all the curialists were conservative (Cardinal Bea, if I recall, was seen as a liberal.) In other words, what we have here is an unthinking rehearsal of the "Spirit of Vatican II" narrative of rupture.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 25, 2012 12:55:31 GMT
I thought many aspects of Mr Fisher's piece unbelievably silly. If Angelo Roncalli didn't have a distinguished career in the Secretariat of State, why was he given the prestigious position of Papal Nuncio to Paris? Likewise, he also distinguished himself as an ecclesiastical historian. I heard of two Irish Augustinian priests who met him in an audience while students at St Patrick's College, Rome. When he heard the name of the college, he quoted the piece in St Patrick's Confessions about praying 100 times a day and 100 times a night in word perfect Latin. This is evidence of scholarship or diplomacy or both.
Seems Mr Fisher is either living in a dreamworld or doesn't believe in letting the truth get in a way of a good story.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 25, 2012 17:43:36 GMT
One "legend" which I have heard from trads and liberals is that Roncalli was seen as having blotted his copybook as Nuncio to Bulgaria by agreeing to the (Orthodox) King's marriage to a Catholic princess on the basis of what he thought was a clear understanding that the Church's marriage rules would be observed - an "understanding" which promptly had a coach and six driven through it by the Bulgarian authorities. According to this narrative, he was punished for this blunder by being sent as Nuncio to Turkey, seen as a backwater.
This narrative goes on to suggest that he was made Nuncio to France because when de Gaulle decided the previous Nuncio was no longer acceptable because seen as too close to Vichy, the Vatican decided that as payback they would give the French someone they saw as a notorious second-rater. Finally, when he stood down as Nuncio to France, he was made Patriarch of Venice as a diplomatic courtesy to the French.
I must say the last of these is pretty hard to believe - Venice is one of the most prestigious Sees in Italy and had produced a recent Pope (Pius X). If he was seen as such a complete loser, there are plenty of dioceses in Italy which have high honorific status but little influence - or he could have been given some high-sounding curial office of the same sort. Both liberals and trads have their own reasons for emphasising the distance between John XXIII and his predecessors, and I suspect both have exaggerated it.
Two points about John which don't fit into this narrative of him as ultra-liberal. As Nuncio to France he oversaw Pius XII's crackdown on the "worker priest" movement when it got out of hand. (Fr Michael O'Carroll mentions this in his contemporary life of John XXIII; I've never seen it referenced in liberal newsmedia accounts.) And he had a strong personal devotion to Pius IX (who was, after all, the last Pope to have called a Council, and who also had a tendency to act without reference to advisers' caution) - he would have liked to beatify him.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 26, 2012 21:31:38 GMT
I was unaware of Roncalli/John's devotion to Pius IX, but I was aware of the crack-down against the worker-priests. I recall hearing of some other 'reactionary' move which Archbishop Roncalli oversaw in France as nuncio - when I think of it, I will post again.
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rose
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Post by rose on Jan 28, 2012 20:20:06 GMT
Vatican II was used as an excuse to implement ideas formed in seminaries in the 1930s in Germany, which led priests to want to make the Church more Protestant. Michael Davies is very good on this point. Vat. II also was the first council with Protestants and non-Christians on the advisory committees, although they did not have a "vote". The input was there. And if anyone here has not read the The Ottaviani Intervention, they should do so. Found by google or on this blogspot supertradmum-etheldredasplace.blogspot.com/
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Post by shane on Jan 28, 2012 22:42:42 GMT
The fathers of the Council of Trent specially invited (twice in fact) German Protestants to attend, not only to observe but also to participate in the Council's proceedings. And promised them safe passage on their journey.
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