Following the vision of Vatican II

[shane]

I don't think the decline of Catholicism in the 60s and 70s can be attributed wholesale to the consumer society or cultural upheaval. Indeed one of the many problems I have with Benedict XVI's "hermeneutic of continuity" is that its emphatic insistence that Vatican II was deliberately misinterpreted (which is simply a historical fact) tends in practice to virtually immunize the texts of the Council from any criticism. For people like George Weigel, the Council was misinterpreted to suit a liberal agenda, the Council itself bears no blame for this and its texts and decisions are of irreproachable legitimacy. They cannot even be questioned. In this view, to attack the Council is tantamount to schism. I think this is simply blindness. Check out Joseph Ratzinger's piece on the first session of the Council in The Furrow in May 1963. Ratzinger accepted that Vatican II aspired to turn the Church upside down and positively rejoiced in it. It is impossible to reconcile his earlier views with the Pope's more recent spin on the Council, suggesting that he is now either delusional or deliberately lying (I suspect the latter). In any case, given the enormous, probably unquantifiable harm that Ratzinger has done to the Church (for which he has not apologized, or even showed the slightest sign of repentance) is he really in any position to criticize the orthodoxy of anyone else? It's like getting a lecture on decorum from someone DELETED BY MODERATOR FOR EXCESSIVELY GRAPHIC LANGUAGE.

Pope John called the Council so as to explain the faith more clearly to the modern world. If that is the standard by which we should judge the Council, then it was a failure on its own terms. Daphne is right to quote Cardinal Spellman's observation about the laity in the early 60s and how it contrasts to the prevailing religious ignorance of today. The majority of Irish people in my generation have went to Catholic schools but know nothing about the faith. Religious education was updated as a direct response to the Council, but it was not improved.

I think the Council undermined the concept of orthodoxy. One of the most powerful arguments used by neo-modernist dissenters following the Council was that in the 40s and 50s theologians like Congar or de Lubac had been condemned, persecuted or suspected by Church authorities for their opinions. Yet, with the Council, these same people had been raised to the highest podium of theological inquiry and their ideas had deeply influenced the Council's texts. The neo-modernists declared, "if the pre-conciliar dissenters were subsequently legitimized, and the Church had been wrong to punish them, and the Church now implicitly admitted this, why should the same not eventually happen with us?"

I've read Sacrosanctum Concilium countless times and I'm very unhappy with it. It's a schizophrenic document that lacks clarity and is full of loopholes (and includes some intolerably subversive elements, eg. encouraging the readings in the vernacular). Liturgical reform would have happened anyway, such was the growing strength of the liturgical movement but Vatican II did nothing to stop it and positively embraced its ideas.

If the Church were to simply 'forget' Vatican II (as has happened in practice with many ecumenical councils) I don't think much would be lost. There is very little of value in its texts, almost all of it is torturous gibberish, and has little relevance to the world of today (which is extremely different from the world of 1962).

[Beinidict Ó Niaidh]

Youngireland and Shane are both absolutely right about the younger generation and their level of religious knowledge. This applies to the generation in early middle age too. In fact it's running into a third generation of illinformed belief/unbelief. Grandparents did a little to mitigate the gaps in their grandchildren's knowledge up until now - now we are getting an emerging generation of grandparents who were the first to get the new catechetics. One lady, who was not ancient by any means, spoke passionately after Éanna Johnson's talk at the Brandsma Review Sympossium in July. She said she had recently become a greatgrandmother. The possibility that greatgrandparents would bare part of the burden of rectifying religious miseducation is in itself an indictment on the system.

I don't doubt Shane's words about the then Fr Ratzinger's Furrow article, but what about the possibility that the 1968 rebellion and its consequences made him see another way. It is true there is a lot of unnecessary verbiage in the Council documents and that precision isn't one of their virtues either.

[hibernicus]

My point about the fact that the influence of consumerism on the Church was already causing concern in much of Europe and America is not to suggest that this alone was responsible for the disasters which befell the Church after the Council, and that the Council is beyond criticism. It was to point out that the idea (put forward by Michael Davies and repeated in Daphne MacLeod's piece) that the Council came from nowhere out of a clear blue sky, and that if there had been no Council none of these disasters would have taken place, is just unsustainable - it reflects a particular moment in British/Irish Catholicism which was not really representative of the state of the Church worldwide.
I confess that although I recently acquired a copy of the Council documents I have not read them yet - I am engaged in a continuing process of personal education on the subject.
In relation to Shane's points - how can the Council be forgotten as you suggest? It happened. It was unquestionably a legitimate General Council. We're not living in 1958, and even if we saw 1958 as a period of perfection and wanted to get back to it, we would need to begin by working out where we are now and what to do to attain that end - not by simply ignoring everything that has taken place since then.
It is not tantamount to schism to suggest that the Council needs to be reinterpreted, even corrected in the light of tradition. It is tantamount to schism to suggest that the whole Council can just be discarded as so much rubbish.
You seem to operate on the assumption that the liturgical movement AS SUCH was bad and should have been prevented.
Part of the blame for calling the notion of orthodoxy into question lies with those new theologians who really were heterodox, but part of it lies with people who treated a particular style of theology as the only one acceptable and treated any other approach with suspicion. Are you really going to say that every verdict of heterodoxy delivered by the Holy Office should be treated as irreversible? That because Cardinal Newman, for example, was suspected of heterodoxy and is/was invoked by some genuine heretics, he should be treated as an irredeemable heretic?
Lastly, Shane ought to distinguish between what Joseph Ratzinger may or may not have said and done and the office he holds as Pope Benedict XVI, which certainly does give him the right to lecture others on orthodoxy. Might I suggest that if he wants to use invective he should focus this invective on what in his opinion was mistaken about Joseph Ratzinger's views and why they were mistaken - not graphic terms which simply show that he considers the object of his criticism beneath contempt but have no intellectual content in themselves. [ON REFLECTION, AND AFTER RECEIVING COMPLAINTS FROM A BOARD MEMBER, I HAVE DELETED THE TERMS USED BY SHANE - NOT BECAUSE I DISAGREE WITH HIM, THOUGH I DO, BUT BECAUSE HIS LANGUAGE IMHO EXCEEDED THE BOUNDS OF DECENCY. I WILL GIVE YOU ALL THE LATITUDE I CAN IN STATING YOUR POINT OF VIEW, BUT THERE ARE LIMITS TO THE LANGUAGE I WILL TOLERATE - HIB.] It's always a mistake to treat your own views as self-evident; it doesn't convince anyone who doesn't already agree, and it keeps you from thinking it through.
Everything you say about the disgraceful state of religious education is correct, and it is one of the worst disasters of the post-conciliar period, but does it derive solely from the Council? And would ditching the Council wholesale - assuming tht were possible - do anything to remedy it?

[hibernicus]

Tracey Rowlands discusses the virtues and limitations of GAUDIUM ET SPES, and the different interpretations (which she associates with Schillebecx and Wojtyla) about the extent to which it can be read as presenting human endeavour as autonomous from God

www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/1944/the_good_the_bad_and_igaudium_et_spesi.aspx#.URVkMaVSiAY

[melancholicus]

Presented by Sandro Magister, a view of the 'vision' of Vatican II by the late Fr Divo Barsotti, a view with which I can in no wise disagree:

chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350426?eng=y

[EXTRACT]
"I am perplexed with regard to the Council: the plethora of documents, their length, often their language, these frightened me. They are documents that bear witness to a purely human assurance more than two [sic] a simple firmness of faith. But above all I am outraged by the behavior of the theologians.”

"The Council is the supreme exercise of the magisterium, and is justified only by a supreme necessity. Could not the fearful gravity of the present situation of the Church stem precisely from the foolishness of having wanted to provoke and tempt the Lord? Was there the desire, perhaps, to constrain God to speak when there was not this supreme necessity? Is that the way it is? In order to justify a Council that presumed to renew all things, it had to be affirmed that everything was going poorly, something that is done constantly, if not by the episcopate then by the theologians.”

"Nothing seems to me more grave, contrary to the holiness of God, than the presumption of clerics who believe, with a pride that is purely diabolical, that they can manipulate the truth, who presume to renew the Church and to save the world without renewing themselves. In all the history of the Church nothing is comparable to the latest Council, at which the Catholic episcopate believed that it could renew all things by obeying nothing other than its own pride, without the effort of holiness, in such open opposition to the law of the gospel that it requires us to believe how the humanity of Christ was the instrument of the omnipotence of the love that saves, in his death.”
[END OF EXTRACT]

These remarks are quoted in a forthcoming book by Professor Enrico Maria Radaelli, a disciple of the late Romano Amerio (of Iota Unum fame).

There is more. Radaelli presents as the most likely conditions of reconciliation with the SSPX, the following:

[EXTRACT]
In order for this goal to be reached, Radaelli presupposes two things:

- that Rome would guarantee to the Lefebvrists the right to celebrate the Mass and the sacraments exclusively according to the rite of St. Pius V;

- and that the obedience required for Vatican II would be brought back within the limits of its “false-pastoral” language, and therefore be subject to criticisms and reservations.

But before this culmination - Radaelli adds - two other requests would have to be granted:

- the first, advanced in December of 2011 by the bishop of Astana in Kazakistan, Athanasius Schneider, is the publication on the part of the pope of a sort of new "Syllabus,” which would strike with anathemas all of the "modern-day errors";

- The second, already proposed by the theologian Brunero Gherardini to the supreme magisterium of the Church, is a “revision of the conciliar and magisterial documents of the last half century,” to be done “in the light of Tradition.”
[END OF EXTRACT]

Fr Zuhlsdorf, linking to the Magister article, remarks that this "might upset some people". Yes, indeed, but so what? Even he concedes that "some parts make sense". For my part, I aver that it (not just 'parts' of it) makes sense in toto.

What is particularly refreshing is to see such thoughts being articulated in the first instance; the taboo against regarding the council as anything other than wonderful in every respect seems at last to be passing away (and not before time).

The 'vision' of Vatican II was/is a chimera, a mirage, much like those imaginary oases glimpsed on the horizon by thirsty travellers in the desert. I think we can discern three distinct phases in the attitude of holy Church to Vatican II and its 'vision':

THE FIRST PHASE, which we have all already lived through: the phase of the 'spirit' of the council, during which the council was regarded with universal adulation (Redemptor Hominis, anyone?) and during which to express any criticism at all would be to place oneself in the camp of the Lefebvrists, regardless of one's views on the actual Lefebvrists. This phase, I think it fair to say, persisted up until the death of John Paul II, although it may have been waning in his last years.

THE SECOND PHASE, in which we are at present, is one of recognition that the 'spirit' of the council has caused incalculable damage to the Church in all her endeavours. The 'spirit' is now rejected as a perversion of the council's original intent. But who can say what the council's original intent actually was? Hence, the defining characteristic of this present phase is a call for return to the 'letter' of the council, i.e. the actual content of the documents, rather than what some starry-eyed clerical hippy thinks they contain. This phase will last for some years; the present Pope (as a former conciliar peritus) is determined to salvage Vatican II for posterity. His as yet unknown successor will also likely be personally connected with the council in some way. Thus the quest for the 'historical Vatican II' will continue for another decade yet or more.

THE THIRD and final phase will be reached when holy Church finally recognizes - and she will - that the intent of the council or the vision of the council, or whatever you want to call it, will not be found by reading the documents, however many times theologians may pore over them. The Church may even realize that the intent/vision/whatever of the council may not even be relevant, and hence not worth wasting any more time over. At which time a turning point will have been reached: the Church will face the choice between revising the conciliar documents in the light of sacred tradition (as Radaelli has called for) or else jettisoning the council entirely... perhaps not with anathemas or some such but by conceding it was a merely 'pastoral' council and allowing it to be quietly forgotten.

Alas that we may have to wait another twenty or thirty years before that point is reached!

[Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha]

I have a great deal of sympathy for Melancholicus approach and I think he is absolutely correct on the first and second phases of appreciation of the council.

Whether the third phase emerges is another matter. But there are a couple of things that need to be done in relation to assessing the Council:

1. The Council needs to be interpreted in its proper cultural and historic context. The Council took place in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and at the height of the Cold War. There were quite a few contrasting philosophical and aesthetic positions at play here. On one hand there was a serious outbreak of optimism which departed from the Christian view of the flawed nature of man. On the other hand, there was also a non-Christian despair regarding imminent nuclear annihalation. This was where the Sexual Revolution came from and that had repercussions for the post-conciliar Church too.

2. The Council remains a general council of the Church. The importance of any council diminishes over time. There is nothing in the Second Vatican Council on par with the promulgation of Papal infallibility of the First or the reforms of Trent. It will probably become more like the short-lived Council of Florence in 1439, which succeeded in re-uniting the eastern and western Churches. This became meaningless after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

3. More difficult is the ordinary form Mass. Like it or not, a couple of generations have grown up with the new liturgy. We cannot just impose something else on them. Over all, I am not impressed with the evangelical abilities of traditionalists. There is a huge potential congregation out there - but they need to know the how and why of the traditional liturgy. Simply supplanting the ordinary form is not an option. As long as people want it, it must remain.

I think there may be a modified version of the third phase Melancholicus proposes in the future, but the Second Vatican Council is not as insignificant to the Church as, say the Avignon Papacy, that it will just disappear as time moves on.

[hibernicus]

One interesting point that has been made is that Benedict XVI is the last Pope to have participated in Vatican II and to have been shaped by the high expectations of 1950s European Catholicism. Any likely successor will have been born 1938-58, so will have relatively little adult experience of the pre-Vatican II church and be much more shaped by the experience of crisis and decline. (This will be less true for an African or LAtin American, but they didn't escape unscathed either.)
Here are Pope Benedict's parting thoughts on the difference between the authentic Council and the council presented by the media:
rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2013/02/pope-offers-final-view-of-council.html
EXTRACT
[T]here was the Council of the Fathers – the true Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council in and of itself, and the world perceived the Council through them, through the media. So the Council that immediately, effectively, got thorough to the people was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. And meanwhile, the Council of the Fathers evolved within the faith, it was a Council of the faith that sought the intellect, that sought to understand and try to understand the signs of God at that moment, that tried to meet the challenge of God in this time to find the words for today and tomorrow. So while the whole council – as I said – moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of journalists did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith but within the categories of the media of today, that is outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of politics.

The media saw the Council as a political struggle, a struggle for power between different currents within the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of whatever faction best suited their world. There were those who sought a decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the Word for the “people of God”, the power of the people, the laity. There was this triple issue: the power of the Pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and then the power of all … popular sovereignty. Naturally they saw this as the part to be approved, to promulgate, to help.

This was the case for the liturgy: there was no interest in the liturgy as an act of faith, but as a something to be made understandable, similar to a community activity, something profane. And we know that there was a trend, which was also historically based, that said: “Sacredness is a pagan thing, possibly even from the Old Testament. In the New Testament the only important thing is that Christ died outside: that is, outside the gates, that is, in the secular world”. Sacredness ended up as profanity even in worship: worship is not worship but an act that brings people together, communal participation and thus participation as activity. And these translations, trivializing the idea of ​​the Council, were virulent in the practice of implementing the liturgical reform, born in a vision of the Council outside of its own key vision of faith. And it was so, also in the matter of Scripture: Scripture is a book, historical, to treat historically and nothing else, and so on.

And we know that this Council of the media was accessible to all. So, dominant, more efficient, this Council created many calamities, so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, the liturgy was trivialized … and the true Council has struggled to materialize, to be realized: the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. But the real strength of the Council was present and slowly it has emerged and is becoming the real power which is also true reform, true renewal of the Church.

It seems to me that 50 years after the Council, we see how this Virtual Council is breaking down, getting lost and the true Council is emerging with all its spiritual strength. And it is our task, in this Year of Faith, starting from this Year of Faith, to work so that the true Council with the power of the Holy Spirit is realized and Church is really renewed. We hope that the Lord will help us.

I, retired in prayer, will always be with you, and together we will move ahead with the Lord in certainty. The Lord is victorious! Thank you.
Benedict XVI
Meeting with Roman Clergy
February 14, 2013
END
If you follow the original link note that, as always, some of the commenters on RORATE CAELI are decidedly wild and woolly.

[melancholicus]

Thank you, Alaisdir, for your feedback. In reference to the third of the points you raised, I might offer two clarifications of my views:

1. I think I should regard the Novus Ordo as a separate issue from that of the reception of the council. While it is true that the council recommended liturgical revision and mandated some specific changes (such as the suppression of the liturgical hour of Prime, whatever one may think of that) it also stipulated that no changes were to be made unless the good of the Church positively required them. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I am sure that a great many changes were introduced in good faith (or at least in innocent ignorance of the consequences), but the Constitution on the liturgy is so broad and open-ended that one reader's understanding of what is mandated must necessarily differ from that of his neighbor. The Novus Ordo itself was not mandated by the council, indeed I believe hardly any of the bishops who signed Sacrosanctum Concilium could have guessed what radical departures from orthopraxis lay ahead.

2. I should not of course wish for the suppression of the Novus Ordo by force of authority. If I were pope (which, thankfully, I am not) I should not attempt its suppression, but permit it to stand indefinitely for the spiritual nourishment of those clergy and laity attached to it. On the other hand, I would attempt to fix its numerous problems - urging the reintroduction of ad orientem worship, for instance, as well as restoring the offertory and (as gently as possible) urging the phased elimination from the rite of such unworthy features of contemporary liturgical celebrations as the abuse of the sign of peace, 'extraordinary' ministers of holy communion, ad-libbery, communion in the hand, communion under both kinds and the dreadful OCP 'hymns'. Today we inhabit a vastly changed Church, and the first order of business will be to reign in the abuses within the Novus Ordo. I recognize that it is not possible to return the pre-conciliar status quo merely by papal decree; we can only do our best with the situation as we find it.

I express hope that the Church will continue to reform the extremely poor standard of the liturgy in our time. I feel this need keenly, for I live in a town adjoining a military base in central Texas, a town in which there is one Catholic church. This church offers the usual bog-standard Amchurch Novus Ordo, complete with the horrible OCP 'hymns'... the arrival of the new translation was a welcome improvement, but the overall ethos of the Mass has not changed. There is nothing else round about; the same bog-standard Amchurch Novus Ordo a few miles further away in Copperas Cove, the same on offer in Belton. The closest TLM is celebrated in Austin, and due to *gas prices and other considerations a 160-mile round trip every Sunday to attend Mass is simply not feasible. Therefore I have a very great interest in the reform of the reform and, by extension, what the next papacy will bring.

*I mean petrol prices of course, but I have started speaking American now that I have become one.

[Deleted]

Feb 14, 2013 23:47:22 GMT hibernicus said:

[T]here was the Council of the Fathers – the true Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council in and of itself, and the world perceived the Council through them, through the media. So the Council that immediately, effectively, got thorough to the people was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. And meanwhile, the Council of the Fathers evolved within the faith, it was a Council of the faith that sought the intellect, that sought to understand and try to understand the signs of God at that moment, that tried to meet the challenge of God in this time to find the words for today and tomorrow. So while the whole council – as I said – moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of journalists did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith but within the categories of the media of today, that is outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of politics.

The media saw the Council as a political struggle, a struggle for power between different currents within the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of whatever faction best suited their world. There were those who sought a decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the Word for the “people of God”, the power of the people, the laity. There was this triple issue: the power of the Pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and then the power of all … popular sovereignty. Naturally they saw this as the part to be approved, to promulgate, to help.

This was the case for the liturgy: there was no interest in the liturgy as an act of faith, but as a something to be made understandable, similar to a community activity, something profane . . . .

And we know that this Council of the media was accessible to all. So, dominant, more efficient, this Council created many calamities, so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, the liturgy was trivialized … and the true Council has struggled to materialize, to be realized: the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. But the real strength of the Council was present and slowly it has emerged and is becoming the real power which is also true reform, true renewal of the Church.

It seems to me that 50 years after the Council, we see how this Virtual Council is breaking down, getting lost and the true Council is emerging with all its spiritual strength. And it is our task, in this Year of Faith, starting from this Year of Faith, to work so that the true Council with the power of the Holy Spirit is realized and Church is really renewed. We hope that the Lord will help us.

I, retired in prayer, will always be with you, and together we will move ahead with the Lord in certainty. The Lord is victorious! Thank you.
Benedict XVI
Meeting with Roman Clergy
February 14, 2013

That you for posting that Hibernicus.

I think the Holy Father has given an excellent summary of the one true Church's Vatican II Vs the Media's Vatican II. Let us pray the Holy Spirit guides his successor to be as firm a rock as Benedict XVI. God bless him in his retirement, he has fought the good fight.

[Askel McThurkill]

This is what we are all praying for right now, Spartacus.