"With the Apostolic Letter of 11 October 2011, Porta fidei, Pope Benedict XVI declared a Year of Faith. This year will begin on 11 October 2012, on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, and will conclude on 24 November 2013, the Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King...." Read more >>
So ... we have a national Presidential election to contend with; and then this. I wonder, which will hold more surprises?
A quick scan of this verbose document and I see mention of "progress in doctrine," of course, but no references to forgiveness of sin or repentance. Meanwhile, both Church and culture show marked public damage from rebellion. LIke the conciliar documents, no economy of language here. Instead it's expansive and bloated sanctimony. And all this is supposed to aid in communication to the modern world. LOL. All it communicates is Rome resembles Washington, D.C. Spirit of Vatican II... Hope and change... seems pretty much a match to me.
ReplyDeleteThat is an apt comparison, JFM, to "hope" and "change" in the Obama presidential campaign of some 4 years ago. Damning too.
ReplyDeleteWhat almost nobody seems to see is just what an outright REBELLION occurred in the 60s and 70s. We're still suffering the aftermath. I leave it to others to decide whether the rebellion merely accompanied Vatican II or whether rebellion animated it. The results are the same. The Bolshevik Revolution couldn't have done a more splendidly insidious job of it.
this looks like another dead duck, like the year of the priest
ReplyDelete"what an outright REBELLION occurred in the 60s and 70s."
ReplyDeleteThe rebellion originated with the influential nouvelles -- Chenu, De Lubac, and Balthazar, as well as Rahner -- who in turn were nurtured by the entire scrummage of modernist philosophers and theologians culminating in Hegel, Bergson, Moeller, Schleiermacher, and so many others. Their hatred for scholasticism and the tradition of their forebears in the Church is open, searing and emphatic, especially in the case of Balthazar. Their ambition was to reinvent the Church by returning to the earliest Church fathers and reinterpreting them through a modernist lens -- in effect wiping out more than 1000 years of tradition and teaching. Not all of the nouvelles shared this ambition in equal measure, but in the end all of them were pulling the same oar.
Aside from the SSPX and perhaps the FSSP, nothing has happened in the last fifty years to counteract this rebellion. Our post-conciliar priests, bishops and cardinals are nurtured on the same diet of ecumenism and communitarian cartoon spirituality as were the council periti. Why should one expect a different result? The theology and philosophical orientations of the nouvelles, of Rahner, of Przywara and the phenomenologists, have ordered the thought of our post-conciliar popes, and flourishes in our seminaries -- even the purportedly "conservative" ones. The transformation is complete. Neo-Caths are thrilled at a line here, a line there, from one or another of Joseph Ratzinger's slender volumes, but Benedict XVI is still the man who, as a council peritus assisting Cdl Frings, worked closely with Karl Rahner throughout the life of the council, pursuing a common agenda, and even co-authoring a book.
[It is interesting that in the years following, Fr Ratzinger became rather coy about describing his activities at the council, insisting, in "Milestones," that he and Rahner "lived on two different theological planets," and leading Fergus Kerr, hardly a rabid traditionalist, to observe wryly that "at Vatican II Ratzinger was a good deal more revolutionary than he remembers." Kerr’s book “Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians”, which includes chapters on Wojtyla and Ratzinger, is an eye-opening read for trads and especially for “whatever is, is right” neo-Caths.]