First editions of THE RATZINGER REPORT...
In searching for an appropriate essay by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on the essential nature of Christianity's Jewish roots, I came across a 1996 essay by a Catholic Jew recalling THE RATZINGER REPORT of 1985, which struck me as being very actual today, as it was in 1996, and as the REPORT itself was in 1985...
The Ratzinger Report
BY ELIAS FRIEDMAN, OCD
The Hebrew Catholic #64
November 1996-Feb 1997 issue
In August 1982, Vittorio Messori, an Italian journalist, interviewed His Eminence, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once known as the Holy Office, or more somberly, as the Roman Inquisition. The interview which extended over a number of meetings, was characterized by the frankness of both partners to the dialogue. It took place in the old seminary of Bressanone, in South Tyrol, where the Cardinal was on vacation.
Questions were put and answers given in an atmosphere of calm and serenity, though they treated of
the most disturbing phenomenon in the history of the modern Church: the apostasy of Europe from the Catholic faith.
Joseph Ratzinger was born in Bavaria in 1927, into a staunch Catholic family. Before being summoned to Rome by John Paul II to take up his present position he had been Archbishop of Munchen and had achieved fame as a theologian. At the conclusion of the meeting, Vittorio Messori set himself the task of drawing up a report of the interview, which he published under the title:
Rapporto Sulla Fede (ed: Paolino 1985). His eminent interlocutor read the text and approved it for publication.
The appearance of Messori’s book sent shock-waves throughout the Catholic world. The book described the actual state of the Catholic Church as reflected in the mind of one of its most distinguished sons. A constant stream of information reaches the desk of the Prefect of the Congregation sent in by qualified persons from every point on the globe.
If there be anyone of whom it can be said that he has his hand on the pulse of the Church, it is Cardinal Ratzinger. His views carry weight; they are those of an authority of the highest order.
Cardinal Ratzinger began by warning that
heresy still exists though camouflaged in many ways.
He affirmed frankly that the last twenty years (1965-1985) have been unfavorable for the Catholic Church and that the results of the Vatican Council were “cruelly opposed” to expectations. The conciliar bishops expected a tranquil evolution of doctrine; the present writer would say, they gravely misread the signs of the times.
The crisis that occurred was of ecclesial dimensions, affecting every level of Catholic belief and practice. The essence of the crisis, according to the eminent Cardinal, lay in the loss of the authentic view of the Catholic Church. The Cardinal seemed to define the crisis as an apostasy from the faith.
He listed certain specific characteristics of the crisis without offering any explanation of the facts
[the interview format obviously does not lend itself to detailed documentation, but the cardinal's comments were clear enough about where the problems lay in each of the fields he mentions]:
1) it was, above all, a crisis of the clergy
2) the religious, most instructed theologically (e.g., Jesuits, Dominicans), were those who suffered most gravely
3) every treatise in theology was affected: in the first place,
- the teaching authority of the Church,
- the Trinity,
- God the Creator,
- Original Sin,
- Christian morality, especially in the field of sexuality and marriage,
- Church law,
- religious life,
- spirituality,
- liturgy,
- sacred music,
- the sacraments,
- the Last Things,
- the mission of the Church.
Perverted views were expressed all along the line, the end of which would have been to offer an altered conception of the Catholic Church other than the one founded by Jesus Christ.
The frankness of the Cardinal Prefect deserves every praise; anyone who has lived through those painful years can testify to the objectivity of his observations.
The cause of the malady was, according to the Cardinal Prefect,
a false interpretation of the intentions of the Fathers of the Council:
They meant to restate traditional Catholic teaching in a way more acceptable to the modern man, not to change the identity of the Church.
Reacting to the danger, the Cardinal went on to affirm: “The Council did not intend in fact to introduce a division of the Church in time."
Whatever the intentions of the Council Fathers may have been, they the fact remains that the Council did introduce a division of the Church in time. What the Cardinal says is based on the truth, which is incontrovertible,
that the deposit of faith cannot change. It has to be transmitted faithfully.
But there have been fractures anddiscontinuities in the history of the Church. To acknowledge the fact does not necessarily imply that the Church ever loses its identity as the Church founded by Jesus Christ, nor could ever lose it.
The Byzantine schism was a fracture, the Reformation of Luther was a fracture, Rationalism, Materialism, Communism, Nazism, all these were fractures, which impacted on the Church, because they led to the dissolution of Christendom, which is the meaning of the present crisis.
The dissolution of Christendom, not Christianity, is the greatest fracture that ever occurred in the history of the Church. It is defined by the apostasy of the Gentiles. It has left “oases” of genuine Christianity, to use the term of the Cardinal himself, but Europe as an ensemble of nations no more bears witness to the divinity of Jesus Christ and his Church.
Church leaders in general miss the point at issue when they blame “others” for the post-conciliar disaster. They adopt an a priori position, that the Council can do no wrong, given that it is guided by the Holy Spirit, therefore, the fault lies with “others”.
But the accusation laid at the feet of the Fathers of the Council is not any sin of commission, but a sin of omission. It consisted in not being able to offer the clergy an acceptable reading of the signs of the times.
The apostasy of the Gentiles signifies that the primacy of honor which Europe has enjoyed for so long, has been withdrawn from them, by the Holy Spirit, which has withdrawn from them not only the faith, but the capacity to believe, so rendering the application of traditional apologetics inefficacious, as the Cardinal realizes.
The Apostasy of the Gentiles and the Return of the Jews to their ancient homeland, seen together, represent the entry of the Church into a new phase in the history of salvation, an immense “jump” in the history of Christianity. The Lord is cutting off the dried branches of the Gentiles to make place for the ingrafting of the Jews. In this way, the Lord will compensate the Jews for the horrors of the Holocaust, the work of the apostate Gentiles and the death of the faith in their hearts and souls.
It is this vision which the Council failed to offer the faithful, especially the clergy. It invited them to update, to adapt to the modern world, without explaining the eschatological framework in which the modern world is held. For this fault of omission the Church has had to pay a heavy price.
Equally instructive is this review of RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE when it first came out by the late Ralph McInerny, who was a popular writer, philosopher, and teacher, as well as the co-founder of Crisis Magazine. He passed away on January 29, 2010... Of course, it doesn't take a theologian to conclude, as Pietro di Marco recently did in his essay 'It all started with Vatican II...' ['it' being the widespread heterdoxy that is now the coin of the realm in ths pontificate]. Cardinal Ratzinger's book-length interview published 32 years ago on the 20th anniversary of the end of Vatican-II makes it abundantly clear. McInerny'es essay has resonances even for the current state of the United States episcopate...
The Ratzinger Report
by RALPH MCINERNY
December 1, 1985
There are zingers and then there are ratzingers. The
Rapporto sulla fede, an interview with the Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is chock full of both.
If a zinger can be defined as a barbed remark, deftly delivered,
a ratzinger is a simple truth about the Catholic faith and/or Vatican II which takes on an edge because its opposite has been stated by seemingly authoritative figures for all too long.
The Ratzinger Report, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Vittorio Messori, has been published in a translation by Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison by Ignatius Press.
It is without doubt the most refreshing, sustained and sensible look at what has actually taken place in the post-conciliar Catholic Church ever to appear. The Cardinal uses the term “crisis” again and again. Like anyone else with eyes to see he knows that the faithful have been subjected to a systematic perversion of Vatican II that began even before the final session drew to a close. In these frank discussions, he makes no effort to disguise this situation. Things are bad but they can only get worse if we do not face up to reality.
This book grew out of interviewing sessions Cardinal Ratzinger granted Messori, an Italian journalist, for an article which appeared a year or so ago in an Italian publication, and which was variously quoted and misquoted around the world. For the book, Messori conjoins with the remarks made during the interviews, passages from other writings and talks of Cardinal Ratzinger. The result, a remarkable presentation of the thoughts of a great theologian and now powerful Curia official, will come as a consolation to Catholics who have found these past years trying ones.
From time to time, during the years since the Council, I have heard intelligent people seriously say that the Church has made more progress in the past five, ten, fifteen years than in the preceding two thousand.
How this cheerful estimate could accord with the liturgical antics, the triviality and heterodoxy of much religious instruction, the revolt of the theologians, the exodus of priests and nuns, the abandonment of their patrimony by Catholic colleges and universities, the scandal of easy annulments, the strange stories of seminary life in the Age of Aquarius, and all the rest of the sad litany that has marked the decline of the Roman Catholic Church would be difficult to say.
With few exceptions, our bishops have been spectators of this disarray, diverting themselves with unnecessary pastorals addressed to God knows who, while under their noses the aberrations listed above have gone on apace. It is not too much to say that there is a pseudo-tradition of heterodoxy that has established itself in these last years that will be very difficult to uproot.
This can best be illustrated by the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s reiteration of the Church’s ban on artificial contraception.The dissident response to this encyclical was unparalleled in its boldness and insolence. Moreover, it was worldwide. Although elsewhere national conferences of bishops seemed to crumble before the onslaught, the response of America’s bishops was loyal.
Of course, their expression of solidarity with the Pope and the Church’s immemorial tradition did not settle the matter. The dissent crescendoed rather than abated and the official countering of it weakened. Charles Curran’s tenure dispute at The Catholic University was symbolic of the struggle, and when Curran received tenure the battle on behalf of the Magisterium seemed lost.
Soon individual bishops were voicing personal difficulties with the doctrine. One auxiliary bishop, alleging personal anguish over the Church’s opposition to contraception, married a divorcee. A monsignor cashiered himself, saying he was unable to support the Pope. The situation was rich in comedy. But there was more than comedy, and I tried to present the complexity of it all in my 1973 novel
The Priest.
It was the theological establishment which consolidated the confusion. Karl Rahner spoke of a second Magisterium of the theologians, one that competed with the episcopal Magisterium. This odd novelty was eagerly seized upon to legitimate the systematic questioning, obscuring and countering of Catholic doctrine on the part of those who were presumably its conveyors, explicators and systematizers.
Soon there was no surer way to become confused about Catholicism than to take a course in theology at a Catholic college or university. No dogma was safe from the comment that “Some theologians wonder…”, with the suggestion that nothing was settled, everything open to fundamental change. And what of the meantime? Who was to adjudicate for the confused layman a dispute between pope and bishops, on the one hand, and theologians, on the other? Rahner suggested that history must decide.
Confusing discussions of the divinity of Christ, the Real Presence and the Resurrection, might seem to have no immediate impact, but calling into question moral absolutes influences what one does here and now. Masturbation, premaritial sex, contraception, of course, and, of late, abortion and euthanasia are said by moral theologians to be sometimes morally permitted to Catholics.
The erosion of Catholic moral practice as a result of this steady assault on Catholic moral doctrine by Catholic moral theologians over a period of two decades was inevitable.
Nor could this attack be justified as the kind of abstract theological questioning that has long gone on in the academy. It did not confine itself to professional journals or to the aulae of graduate schools.
It was advocacy in the undergraduate college classroom, not a discussion among peers, and the corrupt doctrine soon descended into high school religious instruction and, of course, into marriage preparation courses. Even when the “official” doctrine is mentioned, it is with a wink and the swift soothing assurance that one must follow one’s own conscience.
Here is but one instance of a crisis of the first magnitude. There has been a systematic misleading of the faithful as to what the teaching of the Church unequivocally is on matters of sexual morality. From the Vatican, throughout this time, there has been a steady reiteration of sound doctrine such that no doubt as to the true teaching of the Church is possible.
When Pope John Paul II visited the United States, he confronted the issue head on. If there ever was an occasion when our bishops had in their very midst and on their own turf a model of episcopal leadership, it was during that visit. On television, Father Richard McBrien nightly undercut the papal message, but
one hoped that the American bishops would take heart and act like masters of the faith.
It did not happen.
Here was an opportunity and need to address the faithful on the very moral foundations of family life and sexual morality and to speak with authority and clarity on an issue that required both. The opportunity was there to make clear how different the Christian vision of sexual life is from the worldly.
After too much silence, this would have required great courage. It would have meant taking on the theological establishment. It would have meant telling pastors to reassume the responsibility for giving their parishioners sound doctrine. It would have meant opening themselves to the savaging of the media, whose moral standards are far more decadent than those of the mass of Americans. The need for and the making of a great pastoral letter was there for anyone to see. It was not written.
Our bishops seemed blind to what theologians were doing, to what religious education teachers were saying, to what was happening to the faithful in their charge.
To their great credit, our bishops opposed abortion, but such opposition could appear only an exercise in power politics when it was not lodged in a broad and coherent expression of Christian sexual morality.
Some who had dissented from the Magisterium, courageously changed their minds or withdrew their objections. Father Richard Roach, S.J., not the solitary boast of Marquette’s tainted theology department, is a notable instance. He attributes his change to the prayers of Carmelites. So too Michael Novak, in
Confessions of a Catholic, who came a long, courageous distance from his earlier views.
But the pseudo-tradition of dissent reigns all but uncontested now.
As presidents in domestic trouble seek solace in foreign policy, our bishops fled the chaos in their dioceses and, thanks to their Washington staff, managed to get on the wrong side of most Latin American issues.
But the “peace pastoral” was their big bid to regain respectability. And they did. In a sense. With the leftist media, with those for whom America is always wrong. (That pastoral may one day be remembered largely because it occasioned the founding of Catholicism in Crisis.)
The heady response to the peace pastoral, led the bishops on into the thicket of the still-being-drafted pastoral on the economy. As of now, it is doubtful that a second success will be scored. (Given the money spent producing it, this pastoral may be remembered only as a stimulant to the economy it sought to criticize.)
Far worse than the content of these pastoral letters, is the notion, much favored by Cardinal Bernardin, that the bishops have hit upon a new method of teaching. By this he does not mean that pastorals are produced whose contents are not understood by those who sign them, though Dinesh D’Souza has shown this to be the case.
Cardinal Bernardin has in mind listening, dialoguing, and all the rest, which produces pastorals containing what are called “prudential” judgments of the bishops. This means that the bishops are asserting things with which Catholics may respectfully disagree.
Indeed, the only thing in the peace pastoral with which a Catholic cannot disagree — according to Cardinal Bernardin in a commencement address at Notre Dame in 1984 is that the direct killing of the innocent is always wrong.
This has been correctly described as a squandering of episcopal authority.
At a time when the circumstances in this country cried out for clear, authentic, no-nonsense teaching on moral and dogmatic matters about which the faithful had been confused by theologians, the bishops chose to add to the confusion by inviting the faithful to disagree with them on military and economic affairs.
Such is the confused face of Catholicism in the United States of America twenty years after the close of Vatican II. Yet those of us who draw attention to it are as often as not taken to be alarmists, or “conservatives” or people nostalgic for the past. It has been by and large the lonely voices of those speaking without authority that have been stating these simple truths during the ceaseless corrosion of sound doctrine.
The bishops have not admitted how bad the situation is. Indeed, pleased with their peace pastoral, they seem rather inclined to congratulate themselves on how well everything is going.
It is against this background that Cardinal Ratzinger’s remarkable report will be read.
Far from dodging or denying how bad these twenty years have been, he calmly asserts that we are in deep crisis.
His appraisals are realistic, not negative. It is libelous to suggest, as some have, among them Monsignor George Higgins, that Cardinal Ratzinger wishes Vatican II had not happened.
What Cardinal Ratzinger wants to do is to rescue the council from the pseudo-tradition sketched above. “We are dealing with an authentic crisis and it must be treated and cured. Thus, I confirm that even for this healing process, Vatican II is a reality that must be fully accepted. On condition, however, that it must not be viewed as merely a point of departure from which one gets further away by running forward, but as a base on which to build solidly”(p. 34). In short, he would rescue us from that notorious “spirit” of Vatican II which has been regularly invoked to justify the aberrations mentioned above.
Quite unsurprisingly, Cardinal Ratzinger sees confusion as to the very nature of the Church at the root of the crisis in Catholicism. The attacks on the hierarchical Church, the male, paternalistic Church, with which we have become all too familiar, the assertion that Vatican II’s talk of the Church as the People of God has democratized and de-hierarchized the Church, all these are appropriately ratzingered in the Report.
One sees here what is wrong with Cardinal Bernardin’s description of the new method by which episcopal pastorals are written. Dissidents understandably take this to be an implicit acceptance of the democratic Church which will eventually give us women priests.
It was Cardinal Ratzinger’s reiteration of his criticisms of episcopal conferences and their bureaucracies that drew the ire of a Monsignor Higgins.
“The decisive new emphasis on the role of bishops is in reality restrained or actually risks being smothered by the insertion of bishops into episcopal conferences that are ever more organized, often with burdensome bureaucratic structures. We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated; they have only a practical, concrete function” (p.59).
The Catholic Church has an episcopal structure; it is not a federation of national churches. Ratzinger points out the intimidation and wheeling and dealing that go on in the voting sessions of such conferences. His critique of them is motivated by a desire to restore dignity and power to each bishop in his diocese.
Nor does the cardinal flinch from criticizing the criteria according to which bishops have been chosen during these past decades. Above all,
he wants bishops to see their distinctive role, to assert their teaching authority, to be masters of the faith in their own dioceses.
On morality:
“In a world like the West, where money and wealth are the measure of all things, and where the model of the free market imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life, authentic Catholic ethics now appears to many like an alien body from times long past, as a kind of meteorite which is in opposition, not only to the concrete habits of life, but also to the way of thinking underlying them. Economic liberalism creates its exact counterpart, permissivism, on the moral plane” (p. 83).
The divorce of sexuality from procreation, the exaggerated personalism of recent moral thought, must be countered with a Natural Law ethics. Consequentialism and proportionalism will not do.
On women:
“I am, in fact, convinced that what feminism promotes in its radical form is no longer the Christianity that we know; it is another religion” (p. 97).
“For the Church the language of nature (in our case, two sexes complementary to each other yet quite distinct) is also the language of morality (man and woman called to equally noble destinies, both eternal, but different” (pp. 97-8).
The confused male seeks distraction in action, while the confused woman seeks solace in introspection.
Perhaps the most moving pages in the Report have to do with Mary. Ratzinger candidly admits that there was a time when he was inclined to think the emphasis on Mary exaggerated. The remark,
De Maria nunquam satis, seemed too much to him. Now he better understands the role of the Mother of God. The final chapter of
Lumen Gentium locates Mariology firmly in ecclesiology, and the cardinal lists six ways of seeing the importance of Mary for the equilibrium and completeness of the Catholic faith.
In this connection, the discussion of the “third secret of Fatima” is intriguing. Has Cardinal Ratzinger read it? Yes. Will it be made public? Not now. Why? It might appear sensationalist. In any case, this third secret is consonant with what everyone already knows of Fatima.
Since the role of Communist Russia in punishing a sinful world is at the heart of the Fatima message, the reader senses an almost apocalyptic tone in these pages. How quickly we have forgotten the Soviet part in the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul I!. What lies ahead? The Catholic Left persists in seeing President Reagan and Star Wars as the problem.
But the reference to Fatima reminds us what a true pursuit of peace requires. War is the punishment for sin.
The liturgy. The need for penance. True ecumenism. There is more, much more. And the book includes the statement on Liberation Theology, which one is permitted to link with the Fatima remarks.
The Ratzinger Report could be read as a look at what has actually been made of the 16 documents of Vatican II. If he faces up to the misinterpretations of them, Cardinal Ratzinger is calling us to a correct interpretation. It is as if only now the council can begin to have its intended impact.
From this point of view, one would like to think that the Report could serve as an agenda for the Extraordinary Synod which will be taking place when you read this piece. If so, we can hope for a call to order and then a new call to action in the true spirit of Vatican II.
[In fact, it informally served as the agenda, to the point that Cardinal Danneels (yes, he!) told a news conference at the opening of that synodal assembly, which John Paul II had convened to assess the Church's reception of Vatican II in the 20 years since it closed (which was more or less the burden of Cardinal Ratzinger's critique in RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE): "This is not a synod about a book!" At this point, I would love to re-post George Weigel's account of the 1985 synod in Part 1 of his biography of John Paul II, WITNESS TO HOPE. It is one I first posted in PAPA RATZINGER FORUM and then re-posted on this Forum. I will post some excerpts here:]
A CALL FOR AFFIRMATION:
THE EXTRAORDINARY SYNOD OF 1985
...Holding an Extraordinary Synod on the 20th anniversary of Vatican II to relive the Council experience and review its implementation had been John Paul's 'personal idea', according to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, himself a major figure in the Synod drama.
The Council was, in Karol Wojtyla's settled view, a great gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church that demanded both celebration and deepened reflection. Among other things, that deepened reflection required the entire Church to divest itself of the 'liberal/conservative' political interpretation of Vatican II and to think about the Council as a religious event in which the chief protagonist was the Holy Spirit.
Shortly after the Extraordinary Synod opened on November 24, 1985, Cardinal Godfreed Daneels of Belgium complained at a press confernce that "This is not a Synod about a book, it is a Synod about a Council!"
The book in question was Cardinal Ratzinger's review of the post-conciliar state of the Church, a lengthy interview with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori which had been published in early 1985 under the provocative title The Ratzinger Report.
Danneels was right, of course, and Ratzinger would have been the first to admit it. Years later, Ratzinger said that "it was true and important for Cardinal Danneels to say that we had this Synod about the Council as fathers of the Church, and not to discuss a book", because Il Rapporto, as it was known all over Rome, was 'not the point of departure for the Synod."
There was a sense in which Ratzinger was being too modest, however. Il Rapporto was neither the cause nor the substance of the Synod. But Ratzinger's book had given permission, to to speak, for the Synod to debate two questions that had only been discussed quietly in the two decades since Vatican II.
- Had there been serious misinterpretations of the Council?
- Were these misinterpretations impeding the Church's reception of Vatican II's teaching, especially on the Church's distinctive nature as a 'communion'?
By putting these questions openly on the table, Il Rapporto was a major factor in setting the intellectual framework in which the Synod's deliberations were conducted and its recommmendations framed....
A careful reading of the Extraordinary Synod's Final Report suggested that, with varying degrees of conviction and enthusiasm, the Synod members agreed that there had been misinterpretations of the Council adn that it was necessary to reread Vatican II....
The Extraordinary Synod had a few surprises, among which was an inversion of roles.
The progressives at the Synod were the party of the status quo. "Why does there have to be a change?" one prominent progressive - himself a creator of the liberal/conservative taxonomy of Vatican II - complained. "What's wrong with the way things have been going?"
The progressives most inclined to complain about "Rome' and the Roman Curia were also the most vocal defenders of the new curias that had developed in the national conferences of bishops....
The inversion of roles was most pronounced in reaction to a proposal from Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, adopted in the Final Report, that a world catechism or 'compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals' be prepared.
The progressive party, failing to see its relevance to modernity, dismissed the idea as impossibly old-fashioned. Bishop James Malone, president of the US Bishops Conference, when asked about it, told a reporter, "Don't worry about that - you won't live long enough to see it completed."
Bishop Malone turned out to be dramatically wrong. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992, became an international best-seller...
John Paul II saw the Synod, as he had seen Vatican II, as a preparation for the Church's entrance into the third millenium of Christian history. ..There was a real question in many Christian communites as to whether Christians could, after 2000 years, 'give an account' of their hope - as they were enjoined to do in the New Testament (1 Pt 3,15)...
The Catechism was a clear statement that Catholicism thought it possible to account for its beliefs and practices in a coherent, comprehensive and accessible way. it could 'given an account' of the hope that possessed and animated it. It could make a ptroposaltto the men and women of this age...
Although the ringing affirmation of the Church's evangelical mission at the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 did not end the divisions in Catholicism by any means, it did mark the end of a period in Catholic history.
The Council that had taken the gamble of not providing authoritative keys to its interpretation had been given an authoritative interpretation by the Synod. That process could now continue through further Synod assemblies and the papal exhortations that complete an ordinary Synod's work.
Certain interpretations of the letter and 'spirit' of Vatican II had been tacitly but decisively declared out-of-bounds. The temptation to self-secularization had been identified, which was the first step toward combatting it. At least some of the mythology about 'liberals' and 'conservatives' had been dispelled. That was accomplishment enough for two weeks' work...
- From WITNESS TO HOPE, pp. 502-505 re
By George Weigel, New York, 1999
It is of course an inestimable tragedy that the work of two Pontificates in 35 years to recover and validate the authentic teachings of Vatican-II have been greatly undone in the past four years at the hands of a pope who embodies the worst connotations of 'the spirit of Vatican II' and the progressivist anti-Catholic spirit animus inherent in that 'spirit'.
The various language editions of RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE. This does not include a number of reissues in 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary of Vatican-II.