Referring to the upheaval in the Church 1966, orchestrated by the 'Spirit of Vatican II', the late, great Malcolm Muggeridge, under the guise of a future historian looking back, wrote the following, some 17 years before he would be received into the Church:
“My historian’s astonishment would be all the greater that the Roman Catholic Church itself, having witnessed the ruinous consequences to its Protestant rivals of compounding with contemporary trends, should now seem set upon following a like course. Just when the Reformation appears to be fizzling out, another, it seems, is incubating in Rome. Luther escapes from John Osborne’s hands into – of all places – the Vatican. The Church’s profound pessimism about human life, miraculously preserved through the long false dawn of science, is about to be shed at the precise historical moment that it is most relevant and most urgently needed to save men’s reason, if not their souls”.
From the essay, "Backward Christian Soldiers," by Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966 via RemnantOnline.
On the one hand, about V2, there was this depiction of it by Bishop Antonino Romeo, A sinister comedy of three thousand good-for-nothings, with gold crosses on their chests, who don't believe in the trinity or the Virgin, at least some of them don't.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, others expressed dissimilar views.
On the other hand, the Thomist, Monsignor Gherardini, thought Unitatis Redintegratowas "decidedly open to syncretism, and its echo of Karl Rahner's 'anonymous Christians' or of the 'implicit Christians' of Edward Sxhillebecck "is recognizable a million miles away"
However, on yet another hand (Think a Hindu God for this is a now a third hand) five Bishops voted not to accept Lumen Gentium and an American Bishop called the Faithful Bishops Bastards (they had read a letter by one of the revolutionary Bishops stating that he and his ilk were going to capitalise on the deliberately vague language of the conciliar texts to interpret then in a liberal way and they went on the defense against the revolutionaries) and after Lumen Gentium had been accepted as a document, L'Osservatore Romano claimed it's novel doctrine(subsistit was a reaffirmation of what Pope Pius XII held whereas Civilta Cattolica described the novel definition as having great significance because after L.G. there is "no absolute and total identification between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church" but, don't worry, just because the experts of the two official papers of the Vatican were in disagreement was no excuse for others to claim confusion was a major product of the Council.
(See The Second Vatican Council (an unwritten story) Dr. Roberto de Mattei)
The non-ruptured continuity of Vatican Two in which continuity necessarily includes discontinuity; and stuff...
ReplyDeleteIn any event, here is he who abdicated on the putative beauty of V2 as inspired by the inspired one...
The impetus given by Teilhard de Chardin exerted a wide influence [on the Council]. With daring vision it incorporated the historical movements of Christianity into the great cosmic process of evolution from Alpha to Omega: since the noogenesis, since the formation of consciousness in the event by which man became man, the process of evolution has continued to unfold as the building of the noosphere above the biosphere. That means evolution takes place now in the form of technical and scientific development in which, ultimately, matter and spirit, individual and society, will produce a comprehensive whole, a divine world. The Council’s ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ took the cue; Teilhard’s slogan “Christianity means more progress, more technology,” became a stimulus in which the Council Fathers from rich and poor countries alike found a concrete hope . .
Anyone whose ear is still attuned to the speeches made during the last session of the Council knows how eager the Fathers were . . . to do something for mankind that would be concrete, visible, tangible. The feeling that now, at last, the world had to be, could be changed, improved and humanized—this feeling had taken hold of them in a way that was not to be resisted. After all the surprises that had emerged in the realm of theology proper, there reigned a feeling at once of euphoria and of frustration. Euphoria, because it seemed that nothing was impossible for this Council which had the strength to break with attitudes that had been deeply rooted for centuries; frustration, because all that had thus far been done did not count for mankind and only increased the longing for freedom, openness, for what was totally different.
Why is it you mean traditionalists cannot see what an absolutely blessing V2 was to mankind in general and to the Catholic Church in particular and why can't you just accept the facts about it as explained by the CPAs such as Brumley, Staples, and Shea?
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to write that I can not understand what'n'hell those paragraphs have to do with the one thousand nine hundred and sixty five years of Catholicism that preceded the opening of V2 to say nothing about what they mean in and of themselves