Zenit has an interview with Swiss Cardinal Georges Cottier, OP, which you can read in its entirety HERE.
He speaks of the successes of Vatican II which, as he highlights those successes, are primarily structural and sociological rather than successes in handing on the Mystery of Faith. By that I mean that Vatican II led to new structures of collegiality in the Church and an openness to dialogue with separated Christians, non-Christians, non believers and with the world in general. All of these developments are basically "sociological developments" what Pope Benedict would call the "horizontal" aspect of the Church in her relationship with her own members and then those outside of the full communion of the Bride of Christ.
But the Second Vatican Council saw these "horizontal" developments as a way for the Church to evangelize the world more effectively and to "convert" the world to Christ, not so much by proselytizing, but through dialogue and letting others know us as we are and thus opening a path to the Church and conversion.
The Second Vatican Council also saw the new "horizontal" structures of the Church assisting bishops and priests in their awesome three-fold ministry to "teach, rule and sanctify" not by some fuzzy democratic process that would lead to cafeteria Catholicism and the dumbing down of the faith through a hermenutic of a dramatic rupture in that historic faith, but to allow the pastors of the Church the listen to the expertise of the faithful in the secular aspects of the Church's operations, what is lacking in the faith formation of Catholics and how to deal with the ethical lives of all Catholics from the perspective of the Deposit of faith, not some made-up democratic, secularizing of the Catholic faith that is in process now amongst the voice of the faithless.
But what thwarted all this and made so much of Vatican II just a sociological movement was the loss of Catholic Faith, our heritage and patrimony, the rupture that "spirit of Vatican II" bishops, priests, theologians and laity foisted upon Vatican II. This manifested itself in Catholics, while working on structural reforms and dialogue with others, losing their Catholic faith and thus creating a great crisis in the Church. The wrong implementation of Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium, first by flawed historical studies and "resourcement" that led Pope Paul VI to approve a form of the Liturgy that was weak and easily manipulated led secondly to a grand distortion of Pope Paul VI's Liturgy by rank and file clergy and laity on the local level.
Today clergy who are of Cardinal Cottier's generation, which begins around my age of 58, but usually more so with those who are now 60 and older have a nostalgia for the giddiness of the experimentation in the area of discontinuity with the Church's heritage of that period of the 1960's and 70's especially in their so-called liturgical renewal and pseudo-Vatican II ecclesiology applied to the Liturgy that removes distinctions between the priesthood of all the baptized and the ordained priesthood. They are unable to give up their radical thoughts. These would be men like Fr. Hans Kung, Fr. Charles Curran, the aging religious in the LCWR, the We are Church and Voice of the Faithful (less) movements and the like.
90 year old Cardinal Cottier sums it up best when he says:
"I believe that, basically, there must be an act of faith in the Church. The great crisis that appeared after the Council in many Catholics, was that they did not regard the Church as a mystery of faith, as Body of Christ, people of God, Bride of Christ – all these beautiful images -- but as a sociological event. So, why does this happen? Because some are mistaken in the idea. Hence it is that the first need consists in having eyes of faith on the Church, as well as a serious study of the Council, because I don’t know if the documents have been sufficiently studied to be accepted. Having said this, it’s true that in my generation, more than in young generations, there are persons with nostalgia for what they have lived
6 comments:
"But what thwarted all this and made so much of Vatican II just a sociological movement was the loss of Catholic Faith"
This is backwards. The implementation of Vatican II was not caused by the loss of Catholic Faith. The loss of Catholic faith was caused by the implementation of Vatican II.
Which broke down the vertical hierarchical structure that (along with faithful liturgy) had sustained the faith. Before Vatican II, each bishop was alone responsible to God and Pope for defending and preserving the faith in his own diocese.
But this protection of the faith was destroyed by the post-Vatican II collegial structures. Specifically, the personal obligation of the bishop was replaced by the authority of the national bishops conference (eg, USCCB), which in turn was readily dominated--in usual bureaucratic fashion (whether religious or secular) by its most progressive elements, and in particular came to be controlled in its daily workings not by the bishops themselves, but by a lay and religious bureaucracy that worked in opposition to traditional faith and practice of the Church.
Thus, as Benedict himself has pointed out, the individual bishop lost his control to extra-hierarchical bodies of experts (e.g., liturgy commissions). None of this could have happened without the horizontal structures imposed by the Council. For this reason, it is myopic to blame what happened after the Council on the "spirit" of the Council, rather than on the Council itself.
"The implementation of Vatican II was not caused by the loss of Catholic Faith."
Henry Edwards, this is not what Fr. McDonald has written at all. Rather, he is pointing to what actually hollowed out Vatican II, reducing so much of it to just a sociological movement.
"The loss of Catholic faith was caused by the implementation of Vatican II."
So how exactly did people lose their faith before Vatican II, such that St. Therese of Lisieux remarked, long before Vatican II was even on the horizon, that what troubled her most of all was bad Catholics? Vatican II happened at a time of general social and cultural upheaval, and "non serviam!" is as old as the hills.
Furthermore, we are simply always going to have Catholics who do not truly believe, and who put worldly matters before God and the Church and Magisterium in every age. Which should be sobering and unsettling enough to prompt us to pray fervently and persistently that we are not among them for having been tried and found wanting. How on earth do we think that the Reformation happened pre-Vatican II, whereby we get the likes of Cranmer, who basically denied Catholic sacramental theology, particularly regarding the Mass and Holy Orders? And how do we account for those Catholics who did not stand up to the Nazis in order to protect Jews and anyone else deemed inferior and not deserving of life, versus the ones who were and did, and who lived (and in many cases died) heroically? Since Fr. McDonald also mentioned theologians and scholars who ran off the rails, should we also blame Pius XII for Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), which allows for the use (albeit limited and careful) of the historical-critical method in reading Holy Scripture, which both Fr. Robert Barron and Benedict XVI have recently pointed out come out of the Protestant tradition? Let's not forget that the time of "Concilium" (the flagship theological journal of Hans Kung and his colleagues) also gave us "Communio" (the journal set up by Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger in response).
Furthermore, allowing for the input of the laity need not pander to the worst of what the democratic impulse has to offer. The question that such input begs is what areas.
WSquared,
A single errant word that I mistyped obfuscated what I meant to say, thereby throwing you off the trail I had intended. (Though I agree with everything you say, it does not bear directly on my original argument.) What I meant was this:
"It's not that the implementation of Vatican II was thwarted by a loss of faith. Rather the loss of faith itself was caused by the initial implementation of Vatican II."
If one does not understand that post-Vatican II loss of faith was an entirely different phenomenon than pre-Vatican II loss of faith, then one is clueless about the current difficulties of the Church. Pre-Vatican II loss of faith was a matter of individuals, a result of the fallen nature of man, that all are sinners. Individuals always have and always will fall from grace.
What happened after Vatican II was an institutional loss of faith, on a basis coordinated and indeed forcefully promoted from above in the Church. It involved a wide-scale loss of faith by many or most priests, religious, and bishops as well as ordinary Catholics, on a scale and of a character not seen within the Church in recent centuries. For instance, as Fr. McDonald has pointed out, heresy open taught in almost all seminaries, and in almost diocesan and parish religious education programs.
Having lived through it, and having studied it ever since, I believe this institutional loss of faith was a result of the implementation of Vatican II. And I do not mean merely false implementation under the so-called spirit of Vatican II.
It's a matter of what came first. I think that Vatican II led directly to institutional loss of faith, by replacing the vertical by the horizontal--both structurally and in other ways, e.g., liturgically.
After this loss of faith occurred, together with a loss of institutional control, the "spirit of Vatican II" filled the vacuum, and the implementation of Vatican II deteriorated into wide-ranging rupture.
Or, perhaps to put it in a single sentence:
You pointed out that the genie has always been in the bottle, whereas I suggested that Vatican II let it out of the bottle, to infect the Church herself at all levels.
I don't know, Henry Edwards. Examples like the Reformation and the Patriotic Church in China are ones where that genie affected all levels of the Church before Vatican II.
Let's be quite clear on this. The 'spirit of Vatican II' and the 'hermeneutic of rupture' was imposed by the Vatican. Anyone who has not done so should read Paul VI's address to the General Audience on 26 November 1969, concerning the Novus Ordo. It is an extraordinary statement, which can be summarized thus: "We're deliberately getting rid of a priceless heritage, including Gregorian chant, which seems crazy, but it's what the Council wanted". Oddly, he gives the impression that the NO will mean a change from Latin to the vernacular, ignoring the fact that a completely vernacular Mass had been the norm for over two years. He misquotes Sacrosanctum Concilium. His reasons for the changes are unconvincing, in fact he makes a far better case for not changing anything in the first place.
Had Pius XII not denied Montini a red hat he might well have been elected in 1958 and there would have been no Council. His decision to reconvene the Council in 1963 was the greatest mistake made by any Pontiff in at least the last 500 years.
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