The following is a biased review by someone who is obviously on the side of the Vatican-II 'spiritists', and yet he concedes that there really has not been any fundamental difference between what Joseph Ratzinger said about Vatican-II to what Benedict XVI has been saying - except, he claims, his attitude towards collegiality, which Nash attempts to spin as a change that resulted because Professor Ratzinger then went on to be 'the head of the most powerful curial congregation' for 24 years...
Of course, the caveat is that a reviewer can choose to cite only those statements that support his bias, and that is precisely the criterion employed here.
A note about the book: It first came out in English in 1996, and has since undergone three editions, I believe, the latest in 2009 (the re-editions are in themselves a surprising sign, probably remarkable for a book that does not purport to be a formal history of Vatican II). Beats me why it is only being reviewed now... but I seem to recall a Commonweal review of it last year (I'll look it up)....
The arc from Fr. Ratzinger to Benedict XVI
THEOLOGICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF VATICAN II
By Joseph Ratzinger
Published by Paulist Press, $16.95
Reviewed by NICHOLAS LASH
April 21, 2010
After each of the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, Joseph Ratzinger, the young German theologian who acted as expert adviser to Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne, Germany, published a booklet reporting on the session just concluded.
In 1966, the year after the council ended, these booklets were gathered into book form, in both German and English. This book has now been reissued, with an introduction by Jesuit Fr. Thomas Rausch.
Although the first session of the council produced no concrete results, it was, according to Ratzinger, of outstanding importance for two reasons. In the first place, in refusing to endorse the materials prepared by the Roman curia, “the body of bishops” demonstrated that it “was a reality in its own right.”
The preparatory schema on revelation, for example, was “utterly a product of the ‘antimodernist’ mentality,” according to Ratzinger. Would the “almost neurotic denial of all that was new” be continued? Or would the church “turn over a new leaf, and move on into a new and positive encounter with its own origins, with its brothers, and with the world of today? Since a clear majority of the fathers opted for the second alternative, we may even speak of the council as a new beginning.”
In rejecting the schema on revelation “the council had asserted its own teaching authority. And now, against the curial congregations which serve the Holy See and its unifying functions, the council had caused to be heard the voice of the episcopate -- no, the voice of the universal Church.”
In the second place, the first chapter of the Constitution on the Liturgy “contains a statement that represents for the Latin church a fundamental innovation.” The statement in question is the stipulation that, within certain limits, episcopal conferences “possess in their own right a definite legislative function.”
Ratzinger sees this as of outstanding importance: “Perhaps one could say that this small paragraph, which for the first time assigns to the conferences of bishops their own canonical authority, has more significance for the theology of the episcopacy and for the long desired strengthening of episcopal power than anything in the Constitution on the Church itself.”
Whereas previous popes had “regarded the curia as their personal affair on which a council had no right to encroach,” as a result of Pope Paul VI’s opening address to the second session, “the theme of curial reform was ... in a sense officially declared open for council debate.”
At the heart and center of debates on the schema on the church was the notion of collegiality: “Just as Peter belonged to the community of the Twelve, so the Pope belongs to the college of bishops, regardless of the special role he fills, not outside but within the college.”
Later discussion of the schema on bishops sought concretely to implement the concept of collegiality by decentralizing power to bishops and episcopal conferences, and by proposing appropriate forms of centralization through the creation of “an episcopal council in Rome.”
Ratzinger’s reflections on the debates on ecumenism, the schema on which may be seen as “a pastoral application of the doctrine in the schema on the church,” contain an interesting discussion on the relationship between “churches” and “the church” in the form of a detailed response to the Protestant ecclesiology laid out in October 1963 in a lecture in Rome by Edmund Schlink of Heidelberg, Germany.
This session saw the promulgation of the first two conciliar texts, the Constitution on the Liturgy and the Decree on the Media of Social Communication.
Paul VI’s formula of approbation broke with the custom, since the late Middle Ages, of regarding conciliar decisions being put into effect as papal law: “Paul, bishop, servant of the servants of God,
together with the council fathers” (my stress).
In September 1964, “the chapter on the collegiality of bishops was passed on the very first ballot by a two-thirds majority.” Unsurprisingly, Ratzinger’s chapter on the third session, during which the Constitution on the Church was promulgated, concentrates on the doctrine of episcopal collegiality and on the not unrelated structural issue of the relations between Pope and council.
On the former, Ratzinger says that the notion that the Church, which consists of worshiping communities, is “accordingly built up from a community of bishops ... is probably the central idea in the council’s doctrine of collegiality.”
He puts his finger on what he calls “the actual weakness of the debate on collegiality”: “So much energy was focused on the relation of collegiality to the primacy that the intrinsic problems of the collegial principle itself, its complexity, its limits and its historical variability were no longer seen.”
Where the relations between Pope and council are concerned, he believes that the papal interventions during November 1964, however necessary in the interest of mediating between opposing forces in the council, showed that “the papacy had not yet found a form for the formulation of its position,” that is not, and does not appear to be, monarchical. This, he believes, is a practical rather than a theoretical problem in the sense that its resolution will take time: “Patience is necessary.”
The most striking feature of the chapter on the third session, however, comes in its concluding remarks. Noting that “the episcopate became more open-minded from year to year,” and that as the bishops, “from somewhat timid and tentative beginnings,” found voice and courage, they boldly made statements that “five years ago would have been virtually unthinkable,” Ratzinger suggests that the “true event” of the council has been “the awakening of the church.”
Caught up in a worldwide unity of purpose, “
this spiritual awakening... was the great and irrevocable event of the council. It was more important in many respects than the texts it passed.”
Now things really are getting interesting, for this is exactly the assessment made by the late Giuseppe Alberigo, in his conclusion to the fifth and final volume of the massive History of Vatican II, of which he was general editor.
[Not so! From the statement quoted, Ratzinger was referring to a 'spiritual awakening of the Church', in the orthodox sense of spiritual, i.e., the transcendent - whereas Alberigo and his acolytes took the word 'spirit' to describe their interpretation of the Council texts, which was predominantly political and ideological. Their 'spirit' was and still is all about power and who holds it in the Church - as we can read in Hans Kueng's last letter, after all these decades. The 'spiritists' appear to have cast off Christ from the equation, to concentrate on the structure of the Church rather than its essence.]
For several years now, officials of the Roman curia have been conducting an energetic campaign of polemic and misrepresentation against this history, in an attempt to discredit the story it tells (I examined this campaign in the final chapters of my book
Theology for Pilgrims).
[Why is it polemic and misrepresentation when someone opposes the 'spiritist' interpretation, which, looking back over the past four decades, had been nothing but polemic and misrepresentation itself????]
The question arises, and it is a question of far more than merely academic importance: To what extent does Pope Benedict XVI agree with young Fr. Joseph Ratzinger?
The fourth and final session of the council “would have to face the hardest problems, problems which had been postponed for three years” -- religious liberty, Christianity and Judaism, and the problems associated with the production of an entirely new kind of conciliar document, the document that became
Gaudium et Spes.
“Despite all disavowals,” there remained in the text of this constitution “an almost naive progressivist optimism which seemed unaware of the ambivalence of all external human progress.”
[I believe Joseph Ratzinger has been consistent in his misgivings about Gaudium et spes, a significant difference with John Paul II.]
It is worth noting that, in discussing the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, he remarks on the question of priestly celibacy: “In view of the shortage of priests in many areas, the church cannot avoid reviewing this question quietly. Evading it is impossible in view of the responsibility to preach the Gospel within the context of our times.” Forty years later, the shortage of priests approaches crisis level, and yet Benedict seems to have succeeded in continuing to evade it.
[He has not! In the interview books that made him familiar to many Catholic readers, he accepts the advent of smaller Catholic communities as part of the general falling-off from religion that also includes the loss of vocations, and has obviously come to the conclusion that priestly celibacy must stay in place. He has argued for it at every chance he gets as Pope. That is not evasion. That is making a decision.]
Paulist Press is to be congratulated on reissuing these lucid, perceptive and enthusiastic reflections on the four sessions of the council.
As I have already indicated more than once, they raise very sharply the question of the relationship between the views of the young peritus and those of the present Pope.
In his introduction, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Rausch says that
Ratzinger’s “own views, with a couple of exceptions, have remained remarkably consistent over the years.” On which, two comments.
The major exception which he mentions is the liturgy. However, I see no inconsistency between Ratzinger’s enthusiasm for the Constitution on the Liturgy, on the one hand, and, on the other, his increasingly critical assessment of what has happened, liturgically, in recent decades.
In the second place, few things come out more strongly from this book than Ratzinger’s wholehearted support for the council’s central project: namely the elaboration and implementation of the doctrine of episcopal collegiality as the framework for, in his words, the “long desired strengthening of episcopal power.”
[Later below*, I will cite a most important consideration by Joseph Ratzinger on the 'collegiality' statements of Vatican II, which Nash conveniently fails to mention although ti is supremely relevant to the issue!]
Benedict is obsessed by the importance of reconciling the Lefebvrist schismatics with the Church. It is this obsession, I believe, that explains two of his more extraordinary undertakings: the motu proprio allowing general use of the unreformed missal of 1962, and the Apostolic Constitution establishing “ordinariates” for disaffected Anglicans.
The first was done without consulting the bishops, and against the known views of considerable numbers of them. [That he failed to consult the bishops is an outright lie. The reason it took him till July 1977 to issue the Motu Proprio was that he was precisely trying to get a general sense of the 'lay of the land'. Of course, there were outspoken high-profile opponents, but they can hardly have made up a significant proportion of the world's 5000 bishops!
And I bet Joseph Ratzinger never argued that 'collegiality' meant 'democracy' in the Church, much less that the Pope should find himself dictated to by the bishops. Besides, I believe his preferred term for the relationship among bishops is 'communion' rather than 'collegiality'. In practically every official Vatican II document, the proviso is very clear that 'the bishops must be in communion with the Successor of Peter', not the other way around! Popes are given the prerogative of a Motu Proprio (literally, 'of their own will'], as well as encyclicals, because the immediate good of the universal Church - in continuity with what went before - cannot be placed to a vote.
Paul VI might never have promulgated Humanae Vitae if he had subjected it to a vote by the bishops, but even he - the Pope of the Council and the immediate post-Council - did not think collegiality applied to his 1968 encyclical. Nor, it must be pointed out, did he think it applied to his Novus Ordo, which was entirely the work of a handful of progressives and was never reviewed beforehand by the bishops of the world before it changed the entire liturgy literally overnight!
And should John Paul II have consulted the bishops of the world before he came out with his 2001 Motu Proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela which gave the CDF responsibility for investigating and canonically adjudicating sexual abuse cases?
You see, Mr. Nash, you cannot selectively single out what Benedict XVI has done as Pope - perfectly within his rights and following his two post-Conciliar predecessor - without looking at them too! Especially poor Paul VI, whose final years were a martyrdom as he watched how his Council had bred a Satanic monster that was far from what he thought Vatican II had accomplished. And the Frankenstein behind that monster - still not thoroughly exorcised - was precisely the spiritists like you, Mr. Mash.]
The second was even more breathtaking: A major structural innovation in the church was enacted without consulting the other bishops of the Catholic church (to say nothing of senior members of the Anglican Communion). [Nash overlooks the fundamental fact that both initiatives are in fulfillment of Peter's function to bring the flock together in the universal Church. Local bishops cannot do that - their flock is their diocese, nothing more. The Successor of Peter is dutybound to look after the stray sheep too, universally....
And BTW, the senior members of the Anglican Communion can have nothing to say as to how the Catholic Church runs its internal affairs - it would have been anomalous and absurd to consult them! Moreover, the traditional Anglicans, who had long since left the grater Anglican Communion, begged Rome for years to allow them a mechanism for mass conversion. The Vatican did not proselytize them in any way. ]
It seems to me that a Pope who could do these things in the manner in which they were done could not be said to have an ounce of genuinely collegial imagination. [Because the spiritists interpret collegiality to mean 'parliamentary democracy', with the College of Bishops as a Parliament and the Pope as a mere titular monarch!]
We need to remember that between the young theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, so critical of the Roman curia and so enthusiastic for the restoration of episcopal power, and Pope Benedict XVI, there stands Cardinal Ratzinger, for 24 years the head of the most powerful of the curial congregations.
What a vicious and mendacious way to end! The 'power' of the CDF has been exaggerated all this time because it suited the media narrative of the Panzerkardinal.
In practical terms, the CDF is far less powerful than the Secretariat of State which controls the entire internal administration of the Curia as well as all of the Vatican's foreign relations. The CDF was only seen as powerful when Cardinal Ratzinger was its head because he came to be seen as John Paul II's right-hand man, not Cardinal Sodano, who was Secretary of State. Sodano's predecessor, Cardinal Casaroli, was certainly far more powerful and influential with John Paul II and on the affairs of the Church, than Cardinal Seper, who was Cardinal Ratzinger's predecessor at CDF. And who will even think that Cardinal Levada today is more powerful and influential than Cardinal Bertone?
Even Cardinal Ratzinger's influence with John Paul II was limited to theological and intellectual support. He obviously had no administrative input, otherwise he would not have encountered opposition to his intentions to investigate Cardinal Groer and Father Maciel when and as he wanted to.
The CDF's primary function of keeping the doctrinal purity of the faith cannot be seen as political power in any way - we are no longer in the Middle Ages and there is no Inquisition now. Nor can its adjunct function since 2001 of dealing with sexual abuse cases. Its power is normative and disciplinary on both doctrine and on the behavior of priests. In both cases, it disciplines individuals, case by case, out a Church numbering almost 1.2 billion. To call that 'power' is to misuse the term!
Here is that addendum on 'collegiality' I referred to above, from the September 2002 issue of a monthly Australian journal of religious opinion
in which Valentine Gallagher writes:
While professor of Theology at Tubingen University, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published his
Theological Highlights of Vatican II. An English translation appeared in 1966.
The Cardinal devoted some space to the explanatory note appended to the document treating of episcopal collegiality. The "nota praevia explicativa" was devised as a guideline for interpretation but was not incorporated into the Council text.
The Cardinal wrote:
As is well known. this note injected something of bitterness into the closing days of the session otherwise so full of valiant hopes. A detailed analysis of this very intricate text would take us here too far afield. The end result, which is what we are concerned with, would be the realisation it did not create any substantially new situation.
Essentially it involved the same dialectic and the same ambiguity about the real powers of the college as the Council itself manifested. Without doubt the scales were here further tipped in favour of papal primacy as opposed to collegiality. But for every statement advanced in one direction the text offers one supporting the other side and this restores the balance, leaving interpretations open in both directions.
"We can see the text as either 'primatialist' or collegial. Thus we can speak of a certain ambivalence in the text of the 'explanatory note', reflecting the ambivalent attitude of those who worked on the text and tried to reconcile the conflicting tendencies. The consequent ambiguity is a sign that complete harmony of views was neither achieved nor even possible. (page 115).
In other words, there was no clear consensus at the Council about the nature and mechanics of 'collegiality', much less that it overrode papal primacy at all - so why do the spiritists behave as though Vatican II had decided the Church would be a parliamentary democracy with a figurehead monarch in the Pope????
And as for Nash's facile comparison of Prof. Ratzinger with Benedict XVI, let me quote from Joseph Small, Director of Theology of the Presbyterian Church, in an article he wrote for an excellent little volume published last year, entitled The Pontificate of Benedict XVI: Its Premises and Promises, edited by the Lutheran William Rusch, professor of theology at New York Theological Seminary and Yale University Divinity School - in which scholars from various religious traditions offered their theological perspectives on various aspects of Joseph Ratzinger's work. The volume was published for the fourth anniversary of Benedict XVI's election. Small writes:
Scholars who are thoroughly familiar with the thought of Joseph Ratzinger observe that he has been remarkably consistent in his views, at least since the supposed 'conservative turn' in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, it is risky to trace straight lines from professor to prefect to Pope.
Professors, even professors of Catholic theology, speak and write from a far more personal social location than heads of Vatican congregations and commissions. The constranints on prefects are different from the momentous responsibilities of Popes.
The professor who wrote Introduction to Christianity, the prefect who was reponsible for Dominus Iesus and Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Certain Aspects of the Church in Communion, and the Pope who delivered Deus caritas est are the same man, yet one whose intellectual wrok has taken place indifferent settings and has had different purposes.
A professor's books and a prefect's clarifications do not predetermine a Pope's encyclicals. Even so, the concerns of a lfietime have not undergone wide swings; consistent themes have been bothe deepened and focused through immersion in a remarkable ecclesial life.
It dawned on me, reading this, that this 'immersion in ecclesiastical life' that Joseph Ratzinger has had - as professor, pastor (Archbishop of Munich). prefect and now Pope - is an experience no other theologian of his stature has had.
Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar remained pure scholars, as did Hans Kueng and the anti-Ratzinger German theologians. Karl Lehmann went on to a long career as archbishop of a major diocese, but has had no Curial exposure. Walter Kasper's itinerary was perhaps most like Ratzinger, from theology professor, to bishop of a German diocese, to long service in the Curia. But neither Lehmann nor Kasper produced a body of theological work anywhere near Ratzinger's. The closest parallel one can find among theologians to Joseph Ratzinger's career is Bonaventure of Bagnaregio. The analogy was so striking when the Holy Father gave his recent series of catechesis on Bonaventure. Of course, Bonaventure did not become Pope, but he is a Doctor of the Church, of which there are 33 now compared to 265 Popes so far. You know where I am going...
And yet Hans Kueng, without any pastoral experience at all, not even as a parish priest, dared write an open letter recently to the bishops of the world! Go figure...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/04/2010 13:17]