A number of innovations of a doctrinal nature are to be found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council: on the sacramental nature of the episcopate, on episcopal collegiality, on religious freedom, etc. These innovations in matters concerning faith or morals, not proposed with a definitive act, still require religious submission of intellect and will, even though some of them were and still are the object of controversy with regard to their continuity with earlier magisterial teaching, or their compatibility with the tradition." (emphasis added)Some of the commentary on this particular passage of the article (in the post linked above) has been remarkably illuminating if only to show how unresolvedly muddled some of the underlying assumptions may be (see in particular the comments by John Lamont).
In France, some observers have apparently decided to see in the intervention of Monsignor Ocáriz a "scathing response to Bp. Fellay." Côme de Prévigny points out in his brief response, however, that the implications flow in an unexpected direction:
1. The author, though an undisputed expert on religious liberty, admits that Vatican II introduced doctrinal innovations, among which is religious liberty....Yet another response, much more substantial, is found in Italian by Mons. Gherardini, entitled "Mons. Gherardini sull’importanza e i limiti del Magistero autentico" (Disputationes Theologicae, December 7, 2011); English translation: "Msgr. Gherardini: Vatican II is not a super-dogma: The importance and the limits of the authentic Magisterium" (Rorate Caeli, December 12, 2011).
2. He affirms that the compatibility of these novelties with Tradition do not follow automatically, that they are subject to debate, that their connection with Tradition is the object of "controversy". The undisputable character of Vatican II, in its more innovative lines, suffers an irremediable blow.
3. Mgr. Ocáriz shows, in this article, that this controversy is allowed, and he implies that it takes place within the Roman Church. He makes clearly known that to think that religious liberty and collegiality are in rupture with Catholic Tradition is allowed within the Church.
This text marks a turnaround because it introduces in the conciliar edifice, through the opinion of a great expert, a leaven of the destruction of innovative ideas, which cannot but place young theologians back into the hands of traditional doctrine.
All just in time for the forthcoming 50th anniversary celebrations of Vatican II!
4 comments:
"The only novelty in the conciliar documents is that they are expressed in a way that permits a heterodox interpretation. The people involved in drafting them did not have any actual developments of doctrine in mind; what they had in mind was the rejection of previous doctrine."
Yes. Precisely. Thank you.
This from the combox to that piece I paste here because I captures my intuition on the whole thing depressingly well:
"I am too dumb to follow this argument but I am not so dumb that I can not see that there has been a huge rupture between the Church of, say, 1960 and the Church of today.
Everything. Is. Different. Everything."
Exactly. Doing research for a paper on Frank Sheed, I read his son's biography of him, where talks about how Sheed experienced cognitive dissonance in the wake of Vatican II and modern Scriptural scholarship, since it seemed like suddenlly everything everyone had known as Catholicism was being swept out from underneath them. It was all "midrash" and "social construction of reality" and self-affirmation as religion. Still feels the same. Again from the com box,
"The Hierarchy dialogues with this that and the other group while continually keeping its distance from that which preceded Vatican Two, all the while telling us that there has been no rupture."
Right. You can be anything but very orthodox and get invited in. Try to be orthodox and cling to religion or a conservative take on the Bible and you are regarded as worse than a "Republican." But, the twist is that If everything can so change, *any*thing **can** change. Which makes all the liberal democrat politicos flaunting church teaching right.
Until Vatican II is no longer regarded as a miraculous delivery from scholasticism and old word tunnel vision, confusion will remain. Hopefully the new missal is a precursor to more good things.
Amazing. John Lamont, especially, is spot on target. Depressing? Perhaps, but the diagnosis is needed.
So what does this mean? We now have permission to acknowledge that Vatican II represented a dramatic rupture with what preceded it? What's next? An infallible pronouncement that water is wet? But what does this mean for the credibility of the papal office which unleashed this revolution? This is a serious question. I don't mean to be confrontational. But didn't the Catholic Church just beatify a pope who went to his grave refusing to acknowledge a reality obvious to anyone with any experience at all of life in a Catholic parish? The whole raison d'etre of the papacy is the preservation of the tradition. By that standard all the popes of my lifetime have been abject failures. (Benedict XVI being by far the best of a dubious lot.) So what do we do now? Trust the very men who made such an awful mess to unmake it? Isn't that a little ..... masochistic, to say the least?
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