As the 50th anniversary of Vatican-II's beginning approaches, and with it the start of the Year of Faith, we can be pretty sure our faith will be assailed and tested constantly and annoyingly by articles like this. which look at Vatican II through pink eyeglasses while consigning the Church to herself to 'irrelevance' insofar as it has not taken up the progressivist positions [and God grant, never will!]. At least, this article incorporates views by staunchly orthodox representatives of the Church in Australia like Cardinal George Pell and lay theologian Tracey Rowland, in addition to the writer's smug reaffirmation of the most common and fallacious progressivist assumptions...
The Vatican's very own revolution
by Barney Zwartz
Sept. 11, 2012
The Vatican II council, which began 50 years ago next month, was the most momentous religious event in 450 years.
On January 25, 1959, the newly elected Pope John XXIII invited 18 cardinals from the Vatican bureaucracy to attend a service at the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. He told them he planned to summon a global church council. The horrified cardinals were speechless, which the Pope mischievously chose to interpret as devout assent.
But, in reality, the Vatican bureaucrats, known as the Curia, were aghast. The Pope, 77, had been elected purely as a caretaker, but here he was indulging a novel, unpredictable, dangerous and, above all, they believed, unnecessary notion.
In their view it would create ungovernable expectations and might even lead to changes. And if there were to be changes - always undesirable - then the Curia would manage them without any outside intervention, as they had for centuries.
They regrouped and fought back. If they could not avoid the council, then they would control it. They proposed 10 commissions controlled by Curia members to run the council, which would discuss 70 documents prepared by the Curia. Everything was designed to reinforce the status quo.
But the world's bishops, led by a generation of outstanding European theologians, were in no mood to submit. They simply sidestepped the careful preparation and arranged their own agendas.
The Curia were right to worry. What Pope John unleashed, now known as Vatican II, was the most momentous religious event since Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation 450 years earlier.
''It was a revolution,'' says American theologian John Markey. ''It was the most fundamental shift in self-understanding by the Church in 1500 years. It is not over yet.''
The winds of change proved more like a tornado, leaving almost nothing untouched. It is difficult for people under 60 to grasp how radical, how wide-ranging, and how deep the effects were because
they do not remember the Church as it was before the council - "frozen in a time warp", as Jesuit priest Gerald O'Collins told
The Age.
[That is, of course, the progressivist view that saw nothing good whatsoever in the Church before 1965 and the end of Vatican II. Surely, a Church that has continued to produce great saints, from the 16th-century Counter-Reformation onwards; and that, as a human institution, has survived all the attacks that modernity could wage against her - from the Reformation itself to the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and the radical secularism of the Age of Enlightenment that has persisted to our day - could not have been all that bad!.. Speaking as a fairly average Catholic raised in the faith, I thank God continually for this gift of faith rooted in 200 years of Tradition, and I do not doubt that hundreds of millions among the world's 1.2 billion Catholics feel the same way - as majority of the pre-Vatican II generation must have felt.]
Pope John intended the Church to emerge from behind the battlements, lower the drawbridge and engage with the modern world. The most obvious and visible change for Catholics in the pew was worship in their own language rather than in Latin, with the priest now facing them rather than the altar, plus an affirmation of the role of laypeople.
But there were other profound developments such as a willingness to engage with other churches, even other faiths, a renewed focus on social justice, and a decentralised approach to authority in the Church.
Today, as religious culture wars between traditionalists and progressives rack the Church in the West, Vatican II has become the key battlefield. Both sides want to define and control the council's legacy.
Progressives accuse traditionalists, who have had the huge political advantage of having the past two Popes among their number, of trying to wind back the liberalising reforms by stifling important debates and reimposing a strict top-down control of both practice and belief.
Traditionalists counter that progressives want the Church to conform to the ever-changing spirit of the times. ''Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) has said they treated the church as if it were a haberdashery shop that has to update its window with the arrival of every new fashion season,'' says theologian Tracey Rowland, dean of Melbourne's John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family.
''For my generation, this meant we had to sit around in class holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It was gruesome, especially for anyone intellectually inclined.''
That understanding of Vatican II ''wrecked the faith of a generation'', Rowland says. ''While Catholics were trying desperately to be modern, the rest of the world was becoming bored with modernity and turning postmodern.''
Others found the Council and its fruits inspirational. For Bob Dixon, a teenager in Ballarat in the late 1960s, it connected his faith with the world.
He was a child of the pre-Vatican II Church, with its fixed certainties and emphasis on sin and grace, now often condemned as a fear-based approach to religion. ''But I suddenly began to see that faith was about life and the world and society and social justice,'' says Dixon, now one of the Australian church's most important laypeople in his position as head of the national Pastoral Projects Office.
Young Australian priests who were in Rome for some of the sessions, such as George Pell - now Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney - and Michael Costigan, who began his later career as a journalist by posting home reports, were swept up in the enthusiasm.
Catholic confidence was high, Pell recalls. ''It was an enormously exciting time, a time of great intellectual ferment. We were caught up in this great movement of reform, and we were wildly over-optimistic.''
At the time, Costigan remembers, it was not only the Curia who doubted the need for a council. Things seemed pretty good: the seminaries were full and so were the churches.
But the whole world was about to tilt on its axis. As Dixon observes, the council came at a time of huge social change: the rise of feminism, the sexual revolution, the shifting focus from community to individualism, a different attitude to authority and vastly greater opportunities for education.
''It happened just in time to enable the Australian church to ride out that turbulent time in the 1960s and '70s,'' he says.
Cardinal Pell says: ''It changed the life of the Church. It was an immense achievement.
The change was not doctrinal but pastoral. When I speak to young Turks today who look back fondly to an idyllic church before the council, I point out some changes we take for granted.''
THE council met in four sessions from 1962 to 1965, and produced 16 documents, each a treatise - a manifesto, even - setting out the Church's thinking and future direction in a specific area.
Where before the church's official position was that all other churches were in schism and must return to Rome, the new stance emphasised dialogue and reconciliation.
[But it's the same goal - Christian reunification - this time, to be pursued with a specified approach, not just as a vague prospect for a remote future!] .On other religions, the Church
for the first time welcomed what was ''good and true'' in them.
There was a renewed emphasis on social justice as part of the Christian life alongside personal piety, and laypeople were explicitly recognised as having a central role in the mission of the church. Vatican authority was reduced in favour of a greater autonomy for local bishops and a more collegial approach.
Pell identifies as particular advances the greater leadership role for bishops and also laypeople, whether on parish councils or church schools or welfare agencies.
''The introduction of ecumenism (openness to other churches) has been a wonderful blessing, even in Australia. Old Catholic-Protestant antagonisms have largely disappeared, and the tension now is between the Judaeo-Christian view and non-religious and occasionally anti-religious views.''
For Gerald O'Collins, back in Melbourne after 32 years teaching at Rome's Gregorian University - where he taught what are effectively a fifth of today's bishops and a third of the cardinals - the most important advances involved other religions and social justice.
''No council until [Vatican II] ever said a nice thing about Jews, Muslims or Buddhists. I can't tell you how much I welcomed the very short document on other religions.
''The Church in the Modern World led to justice and peace commissions around the world, and inspired people. In Rome I taught people who died for justice and peace in Africa and Central America. Maybe they would have done it anyway, but Vatican II gave it a major push. Justice and peace is not something you also do, it's at the heart of the faith.''
The increasing involvement of laypeople may have made the Church's leadership uncomfortable, says Sydney theologian Neil Ormerod, but they have had to come to terms with it. Even theological education is increasingly in the hands of laypeople like himself.
''This is a development the hierarchy doesn't know what to do with. Lay theologians aren't under their control in the same way priests are.
Nor do lay theologians necessarily have the same depth of spiritual formation and Catholic identity. [And isn't there something inherently and appallingly wrong in that? That persons who admittedly lack "the depth of spiritual formation and Catholic identity" should be largely in charge of educating Catholics, including seminarians?] Here at the Australian Catholic University we'd have about 40 theologians, of whom only three or four are priests.''
Over the half-century since Vatican II,
the Church hierarchy has wound back many of these radical changes, believing they have gone too far. This has led to the modern culture wars over such issues as authority and democracy, celibacy and married priests, the role of women and issues of sexuality. [What an outrageously false statement, considering that none of the issues brought up were ever advocated or specifically 'ruled upon' by Vatican II! What measures actually proposed in the Vatican II documents have been rolled back? None! And the progressivists cannot cite Benedict XVI's concrete moves on the liturgy, because none of what he has done contradicts the Vatican II decree on liturgy - it is the progressivists who have openly ignored what Sacramentum Concilium specifically says about the use of Latin and appropriate music in Church, and who have introduced the ad-populum Mass celebrated as a communal meal and social occasion rather than as a re-creation of Christ's sacrifice - yet none of their innovations were decreed by Vatican II!]
A recent example is the introduction of new English texts for worship, reinforcing the Vatican view of what worship should be, an imposition resented by many.
[Again, a fallacious generalization. The new English text improves the previous slapdash colloquial rendition of the Mass that was never meant to be the permanent version, since it was hastily cobbled together in the general rush to overhaul the Mass overnight in 1969-1970! An improved translation has nothing to do with 'the Vatican view of what worship should be', even if the Church has every right to be vigilant over the liturgy and the discipline of Sacraments!
This irrational hostility to a translation that is not just faithful to the Latin reference edition but also uses language that is appropriate for divine worship rather than being pedestrian, all goes back to this progressivist idea that 'individual freedom' means that everyone can do as he pleases, which drops the very concept of discipline, a fundamental element in the practice of any faith. To begin with, the Holy Mass, which is the basic liturgy of the Church, cannot be a 'do-it-yourself' affair.It is a ritual that must follow a specific form, language and rubrics. Rituals are not meant to be improvised, altered. diminished or adorned - they would not be rituals, otherwise. To say that anyone should be free to use his preferred translation of the Mass over the official translation is just silly. The old discarded translation was the official one for decades - was the public asked at the time if they were in favor of the translation? No! It was simply imposed on them. Defenders of the old translation are simply defending habit, regardless of objective merit.]
Cardinal Pell, a leading conservative, dismisses the culture wars as all but won. ''There are pockets of idiosyncratic and possibly cranky resistance, and everything is not nailed down even now, but the battle is over. The real challenge now is to hand on the faith to young people and resist the rise of anti-religion.''
Progressives admit their cause is in decline at the Vatican, largely because the Pope appoints the bishops, and the last two Popes, covering 34 years, have been careful
to favour conservatives who won't rock the boat. [They won't rock the boat because they believe in the firm course set for it - they believe in the rightness of what the Church teaches as defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which incorporates the teachings of Vatican II) and faithfully followed by the Magisterium of the Popes, and not as interpreted by any Tom-Dick-and-Harry theologian who is the latest toast of liberal salons.]
The progressives say the real life of the Church is in the parishes (and welfare agencies), and
that the bishops and even the Pope are largely unseen and irrelevant. [Yada, yada, yada! All this rejection of a higher authority is emblematic of putting oneself above God, in the case of parishioners and social workers whose motivation to do good is tainted by their Pharisaic vanity and self-serving interests.]
Conservatives in contrast tend to look to Rome as custodian of Catholic belief and practice.
[But any religion has to have a central custodian and defender of the faith! Parishes and Catholic welfare institutions continue to be guided by the doctrine of the Church - functionally, they are autonomous, but doctrinally, they are not! The way the article writer puts it, one would think that parishes and welfare agencies were equivalent to bishops in their own domain.]
Melbourne publisher of religious books Garry Eastman regrets that the momentum for change has dissipated. ''People like myself in their 60s and 70s who lived through it see that the reform really stopped.
There is no room for the free discussion that took place after Vatican II on the implications of science or biblical research. None of that has flowed down to the local level.''
[Excuse me??? If he publishes religious books, surely Eastman would be aware of the flood of literature in the past five decades relating science and Biblical research to religion - even if his partisanship may blind him deliberately to what various Vatican agencies themselves have been doing pro-actively in this regard! And shame on the article writer who does not challenge such a blatantly false affirmation.]
Robert Blair Kaiser, who covered the council for Time magazine, suggests that ''rather than whine over what daddy won't let us do'', Catholics should be grateful for what the Council did achieve, and build on that themselves.
''It has given us a new view of ourselves. It's made us more free, more human and more at the service of a world that Jesus loved. It has given us a new view of the Church.
It's our church, not the Pope's church, or the bishops' church, or a priest's church. It has given us a new view of our place in it. We can think, we can speak, we can act as followers of Jesus in a world that needs us.''
[Such brave and high-minded thoughts! But no, Mr. Kaiser, the Church is not 'our Church' or anybody else's, but the Church of Christ, who named Peter and the Apostles - and by extension, their successors - to guide his Church in the way he taught. Not even the greatest of saints presumed to think that they were above and beyond the Church, that they could think for themselves entirely and not pay heed to the Church as constituted by Christ. Indeed what distinguishes the saints other than their personal grace and holiness is that they unquestioningly respected and upheld the Church as Christ's Mystical Body, the institution that prolongs his presence in history, even when they were themselves the subject of injustice by members of the Church. It is a continuing wonder that none of this has ever occurred to the progressivists and dissenters who want the Church to be what they think it ought to be, to remake the Church of Christ as they want it to be, into their very own personal and individual 'church', unanchored to Revelation, Tradition and the communion of saints.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/09/2012 23:28]