Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, His Eminence Mauro Card. Piacenza, makes some good points in his speech, like this:
Renewal is always necessary for the Church, because the conversion of her members, poor sinners, is always necessary! But there cannot be, nor could there be, a pre-Conciliar Church and a post-Conciliar Church! If this could be so, the second one – ours – would be historically and theologically illegitimate!I think I know what he means about the generally-received, popular interpretation of Vatican II NOT being correct and the younger generation perhaps being the first to correct this problem. But I don't think a correct interpretation of Vatican II (the specific documents and the import of the Council as a whole) is automatic for the younger generation, although it is certainly much less encumbered by the prejudices of their forebears. Certainly temporal distance will help in the assessment; but so will acquaintance with what has happened, knowing Church history, specifically the history of movements within the Church since the time of the Counter-Reformation and, more recently, since the French Revolution.
5 comments:
Modernist rectors and teachers in some seminaries could influence the thinking of the next generation.
After listening to Popes, reading countless books, and articles by Conservatives desperate to try to agree with Rome about the splendidness of Things V2, after earnestly trying to and wanting to understand, I still am at a loss as to exactly what Vatican II was supposed to or in fact did actually did accomplish! And that winding sentence is exemplary in clarity compared to the rhetoric the Council engaged in and inspired. Really, Vatican II was important because... The Church was dying of formalism and brittleness maybe? Scholastic theology so much relied on propositional catechisms that people were party loyalists and cultural Catholics but not really Believers? The Liturgy was not appreciated? Scripture was not revered or understood? Certainly none of these things were helped by an event that was in staging the Catholic equivalent of a World's Fair-sort of theological Expo. And the Council itself ended up being appropriated as a tool to infuse some very Modernist-leaning orientations into the framework of official Church discussions. It apparently introduced the prototype of the "Hope and Change" sort of mantra Obama Democrats have perfected, where under a rubric of restoration the foundations are obfuscated if not undermined. And now Ratzinger is busy trying to stitch up the tearing seams. I hope he can, but it seems like really so much of V2 was at best The Emperor's New Clothes. Maybe a new generation of seminarians can quote selectively, but if they are bound to the verbose ambiguities of V2 in any sort of larger context, their work will easily die the death all things sane suffer at the hands of academic bureaucracies. The CCC and YouCat are examples of pretty clear books that I have witnessed become halls of mirrors in the hands of expositors tainted by one sort of V2 hermeneutic. Let's hope the next generation CAN interpret through, or perhaps ABOVE, the conciliar texts in all their expansiveness. They contain some great lines, but to my mind mostly when mined very carefully. PTL that it was pastoral and not dogmatic in its ramblings.
Signed, A Frustrated Layman
Frustrated Layman (JFM),
What you wrote here is simply brilliant, in the sense that it encapsulates into a single powerful complaint so many disparate threads of criticisms and questions raised about Vatican II, which, for me and (I suspect) many others too, remain to be answered.
It's a bit jarring for me to think that doctrinal distinctions, upon which may depend the salvation or damnation of souls, have been left to dangle in the winds of "interpretation" for nearly fifty years. Isn't that what Holy Mother Church should be doing for us right now: correctly interpreting what the Council said and what it means? I appreciate the Holy Father's attempts to rein in the chaos of the last fifty years, but his distinction between a hermeneutic of rupture vs. reform is a symptom of that same chaos. It's an implicit acknowledgement that the council documents are ambiguous in many areas. It's quite possible to read them all as being in continuity with Catholic Tradition. As an intellectual exercise, try reading Gaudium et Spes through the eyes of a liberal modernist; if you do it correctly, you'll need a hot shower and fifteen decades afterward.
Misinterpreting Church pronouncements isn't in itself a major problem. Combine it with the breakdown in ecclesiastical discipline, and it's a recipe for disaster.
-KGB
KGB, hammer-to-nail's-head.
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