Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote a very good evaluation of Vatican II at its 40th anniversary in 2003. You can read the entire article from America Magazine by pressing here. You can also read the 1985 Extraordinary Synod on the Second Vatican Council by pressing here.
By reading these two links, you will see that the Church has been clarifying the true nature of the Second Vatican Council for years. It will take more time to allow the true effects of the Council to take root, effects based upon the hermeneutic of continuity, not of rupture.
The following are the salient points of the Cardinal Dulles article in America Magazine 2003:
1. The Council Fathers tried to cast a wide net for varying schools of theological thought. In some cases they adopted deliberate ambiguities.
2. Pope John XXIII, in his opening speech on Oct. 11, 1962, declared that although the church had sometimes condemned errors with the greatest severity, it would best meet the needs of our time “by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations.” Because the council saw fit to follow this instruction, it did not dwell on the negative implications of its doctrine. Framed so as not to offend any large group, except perhaps atheistic Communism, the documents are markedly irenic.
3. The council occurred at a unique moment of history, when the Western world was swept up in a wave of optimism typified by Pope John XXIII himself.
4. In the postconciliar period, the [secular] communications media favored the emphasis on novelty. Progressive theologians were lionized for writing books and articles that seemed to be breaking new barriers and demolishing the old edifice of preconciliar Catholicism.
5. To overcome polarization and bring about greater consensus, Pope John Paul II convened an extraordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops in 1985, the 20th anniversary of the close of the council. This synod in its final report came up with six agreed principles for sound interpretation, which may be paraphrased as follows:
A. Each passage and document of the council must be interpreted in the context of all the others, so that the integral teaching of the council may be rightly grasped.
B. The four constitutions of the council (those on liturgy, church, revelation and church in the modern world) are the hermeneutical key to the other documents—namely, the council’s nine decrees and three declarations.
C. The pastoral import of the documents ought not to be separated from, or set in opposition to, their doctrinal content.
D. No opposition may be made between the spirit and the letter of Vatican II.
E. The council must be interpreted in continuity with the great tradition of the church, including earlier councils.
F. Vatican II should be accepted as illuminating the problems of our own day.
6. It is widely believed that the council taught that non-Christian religions contain revelation and are paths to salvation for their members. A careful examination of the documents, however, proves the contrary. The council taught that salvation cannot be found in any other name than that of Jesus.
7. Regarding the means by which revelation is transmitted, many theologians have argued that the council gave priority to Scripture as the written word of God, and demoted tradition to the status of a secondary norm, to be tested against the higher norm of Scripture. An impartial reading of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, the “Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation” (1965) indicates on the contrary that the council gave a certain priority to tradition.
8. A third error relating to revelation is the view that, according to the council, God continues to reveal himself in secular experience through the signs of the times, which therefore provide criteria for interpreting the Gospel. Vatican II, in fact, rejected the idea of continuing revelation.
9. It has become almost a platitude to say that the council, reversing earlier Catholic teaching, taught that the church is not necessary for salvation. But in reality the council affirmed that faith and baptism are necessary for salvation (Mk 16:16; Jn 3:5), and that, since baptism is the door to the church, the church too is necessary.
10. The doctrine of collegiality is frequently misunderstood as though it restricted the powers of the pope, requiring him to establish a consensus of the world’s bishops before deciding important issues. Vatican II did indeed affirm that the bishops as a college, when acting together with their head, the pope, enjoy supreme authority, but it affirmed that the pope likewise has supreme authority as successor of Peter and head of the college.
11. Vatican II never mentioned dissent, but by implication rejected it. It stated that even when the pope and the bishops do not speak infallibly, their authoritative teaching is binding, and that the faithful are required to adhere to it with a “religious submission of mind” (LG, No. 25). Vatican II, therefore, cannot be quoted as favoring dissent.
12. Regarding the laity, the council did much to clarify their active role in the worship and mission of the church and their vocation to refashion secular society according to the norms of the Gospel. At several points Vatican II urged pastors to consult the laity and to listen to them when they speak within their competence (LG, No. 37; GS, Nos. 43, 62). But at no point did it suggest that the hierarchy have any obligation to accept the recommendations of the laity with regard to matters pertaining to the pastoral office.
13. It is often said that with Vatican II the church, reversing its earlier position, acknowledged marriage as a vocation no less blessed than celibacy. The council wrote eloquently of the sacrament of matrimony as a sacred bond mirroring the union between Christ and the church (GS, No. 48), but it also reaffirmed the teaching of Trent that it is better and more blessed to remain in virginity or celibacy than to be joined in matrimony—a doctrine that Trent traced back to Jesus
14. Opponents of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) make much of the fact that Vatican II was silent on the morality of contraception. The council did not explicitly condemn contraception because the pope had reserved this question to a special commission outside the council. But after declaring that the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation must be preserved in marital intercourse, the council declared: “Such a goal cannot be achieved unless the virtue of conjugal chastity is sincerely practiced. Relying on these principles, sons and daughters of the church may not undertake methods of regulating procreation which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the church in its unfolding of the divine law” (GS, No. 51). At this point the fathers inserted footnotes referring to documents of Pius XI and Pius XII forbidding contraception. If this passage had been written after Humanae Vitae, no revision would have been needed except the addition of a reference to that document in the footnote.
15. The council’s teaching on religious freedom has been poorly understood. It is widely believed that the council recognized that members of non-Catholic and non-Christian religious bodies have a right to believe as they do and to propagate their beliefs freely. But the council declared no such thing. In its “Declaration on Religious Freedom” it rejected coercion by the state in the area of religion, but it did not set all religions on the same level. The “one true religion,” it stated, “subsists in the Catholic and apostolic church to which the Lord Jesus committed the duty of spreading it abroad among all men”
16. Turning in conclusion to the liturgy, I shall limit myself to one question. Vatican II is frequently praised or blamed for having authorized the translation of the Latin liturgy into the vernacular. But the matter is not so simple. In Sacrosactum Concilium, its “Constitution on the Liturgy” (1963), the council declared: “The use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rite, except where a particular law might indicate otherwise” (SC, No 36, Paragraph 1). In the following two paragraphs the constitution went on to say that competent local ecclesiastical authorities may determine that certain readings, instructions, prayers and chants be translated into the mother tongue of the people. The council fathers would not have anticipated that in the space of a few years the Latin language would almost totally disappear. It would be well if Catholics could be familiar with the Mass in Latin, the official language of the Roman rite. But since there are sound pastoral reasons for the vernacular, faithful translations of high quality should be provided. We may hope that such translations are in the making.
Cardinal Dulles concludes: Because the hermeneutics of discontinuity has prevailed in countries like our own, the efforts of the Holy See to clarify the documents have regularly been attacked as retrenchments. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was denounced for its declaration on infallibility, Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973), for the new profession of faith issued in 1989, for its ecclesiology of communion in Communionis Notio (1991) and for its document on Christ and the Church, Dominus Iesus (2000). The Roman document on the collaboration of the laity in the sacred ministry (1997) was angrily dismissed, as was, in some quarters, John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Apostolos Suos, on the status and authority of episcopal conferences (1998). In each of these cases there was a clamor of protest, but the critics did not convincingly show that the official teaching had departed from the teaching of Vatican II, interpreted according to the principles set forth in the Extraordinary Synod of 1985.
I am not seeking in this brief article to defend the teaching of Vatican II on points that someone or other might wish to challenge. My authority could not add anything to that of the council, which spoke with the promised assistance of the Holy Spirit. I can say only that I find the teaching of Vatican II very solid, carefully nuanced and sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of our own time and place. The artful blending of majority and minority perspectives in the council documents should have forestalled the unilateral interpretations. There is no reason today why Vatican II should be a bone of contention among Catholics.
History, of course, does not stop. Just as Vatican II made important changes reflecting new biblical studies, the liturgical movement and the ecumenical movement, we may expect future developments in doctrine and polity. Progress must be made, but progress always depends upon an acceptance of prior achievements so that it is not necessary to begin each time from the beginning.
8 comments:
Bishop Athanasius Schneider has suggested a new 'Syllabus of Errors' to correct misinterpretations of V2. He has the ear of the Holy Father. He may well be the next pope but one.
Fr. McD,
I flatter myself by believing your recent quotation of documents purporting to clarify VII are the result, at least in part, of my open challenge of some months ago for any taker to reconcile one of the four disputed points with prior magisterial statements, the citations to which I provided.
I critiqued one of your (or, more accurately, Cardinal Levada's) efforts, on 30 August, here:
http://southernorderspage.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-doctrine-of-ecumenism-explained.html
but nobody responded to my critique. Either my arguments were so good as to be unanswerable, or they were so bad as to not need answering, because nobody here answered. But since nobody here seems to have changed his position as a result of that critique, I'll have to conclude the latter.
So what of Cardinal Dulles? In your excerpt, he declared "6. It is widely believed that the council taught that non-Christian religions contain revelation and are paths to salvation for their members. A careful examination of the documents, however, proves the contrary. The council taught that salvation cannot be found in any other name than that of Jesus."
Glad to hear it, but in the first place, since Dulles does not distinguish between Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity, his statement is nonresponsive to the subsistence problem. In the second place, none of the VII citations he offers in support of his proposition of "no salvation outside Christianity" actually do support that proposition that the Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, and in at least one case support the opposite. (FYI his citations are to AG 9, GeS 10, DH 1, and LG 16.)
Cardinal Dulles also shifts the ground here:
"9. It has become almost a platitude to say that the council, reversing earlier Catholic teaching, taught that the church is not necessary for salvation. But in reality the council affirmed that faith and baptism are necessary for salvation (Mk 16:16; Jn 3:5), and that, since baptism is the door to the church, the church too is necessary." Sounds to me like he believes in subsistence, since faith and baptism can be had outside the Catholic Church.
In short, Cardinal Dulles's statements themselves contradict the teaching of According to Mystici corporis and Humani generis (e.g. Humani generis 27) that the Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ.
Obviously I lack space and time to take apart every one of the statements of the documents that Fr. McD has quoted, but if none of them is any better than this one, then I have to say that they do nothing whatsoever to clarify VII, much less to explain or justify the much-vaunted Hermeneutic of Continuity. Or, of they clarify VII at all, what they clarify is that VII does_ contain teachings contrary to the established doctrine of the Church.
If the hierarchy purports to be explaining rationally how VII squares with prior doctrine, it will have to do better than this. It seems every time it 'clarifies," it is compounding and not resolving the problem of discontinuity/rupture.
I submit all of the above to the Magisterium.
A5, I think the truth is simply that "the" Church is simply incapable of admitting that V2 was/is and always will be, a MISTAKE no matter how well intentioned it was. There is no hope of anyone in "the" Church changing until we get a Pope who is not eyeballs deep in the guilt of V2. So your critques can not be addressed honestly...we will continue to ignore the Elephant in the room until the V2 contingent has meet it's biological solution. Until then, stick close to the FSSP and SSPX, and fact check your NO Clergy to make sure what you're dealing with.
Thanks you for posting this material, Father. It is very illuminating.
Anon 5: Perhaps no-one responded to your previous challenge due to the symbolic form you used. However, I will attempt to respond now.
Here is just one example (I do not have much time to research all of these matters in depth). On the subsistence point you correctly cite Mystici Corporis 65 and Humanae Generis 27. You could also have cited Mystici Corporis 41, I think. However, don’t those sections have to be read together with Mystici Corporis 102 and 103?
Section 102 refers to “those who, not yet enlightened by the truth of the Gospel, are still outside the fold of the Church, and those who, on account of regrettable schism, are separated from Us, who though unworthy, represent the person of Jesus Christ on earth.”
And Section 103 refers to “those who do not belong to the visible Body of the Catholic Church” and says of them “[F]rom a heart overflowing with love We ask each and every one of them to correspond to the interior movements of grace, and to seek to withdraw from that state in which they cannot be sure of their salvation. For even though by an unconscious desire and longing they have a certain relationship with the Mystical Body of the Redeemer, they still remain deprived of those many heavenly gifts and helps which can only be enjoyed in the Catholic Church.”
Isn’t this highly relevant and suggestive language that supports Cardinal Levada’s (and Cardinal Dulles’s) positions?
And while we are discussing such matters, isn’t section 104 relevant for the religious freedom point?: “Therefore, whenever it happens, despite the constant teaching of this Apostolic See, that anyone is compelled to embrace the Catholic faith against his will, Our sense of duty demands that We condemn the act, etc.”
As I have consistently maintained, I am absolutely unqualified to offer any kind of definitive or authoritative response. That is for the magisterium to do. However, I trust that such a response reconciling apparently contradictory statements can be given, and indeed perhaps already has been given (as with subsistence, for example), when those statements are considered in a broader context.
I await your correction of my undoubted errors of understanding =).
P.S. One syntactical puzzle I have is: In section 102, to whom does “who though unworthy, represent the person of Jesus Christ on earth.” refer? I first read it as if preceded by an implied “and.” However, I am now wondering whether it refers to the Catholic Church, not those who are separated by schism but who nevertheless may still “represent Christ on earth” despite their unworthiness. More contextual interpretation may help resolve that ambiguity.
In any event, one is still left with section 103 and the notion that those who do not belong to the Catholic Church “cannot be sure of their salvation” (a phraseology that does not necessarily preclude it, especially given that “by an unconscious desire and longing they have a certain relationship with the Mystical Body of the Redeemer, etc”).
I would help to read and understand the text in the original Latin presumably.
A2, that line is referring to the Roman Pontiff - "Us, who though unworthy, represent the person of Jesus Christ on earth."
Popes use the royal plural to refer to themselves (or at least, they used to). It is the Catholic Faith that submission to the Roman Pontiff is necessary for salvation.
I will let A5 respond to your other points so as not to entangle the discussion, which is very fruitful thus far. I look forward to his response!
A2,
Your thoughtful comments seem to be the first thoughtful answer my challenge. This is precisely the sort of analysis that my challenge invited. Thank you!
Since my goal is actually to reconcile VII with prior documents--and not to show VII is "wrong"--I don't have any driving urge to try to "disprove" your analysis. I will play devil's advocate for a moment, though.
1) While that "represent the person of Jesus Christ" language is indeed interesting, why not just come out instead and say "are nevertheless still in the Church?" Expressio Unius.
Also, we must take care to understand the "separated by schism" language. here in the protestant South, we probably rush to understand it as any non-Catholic who professes to be Christian, e.g., Episcopalians, Methodists, baptists, etc. My guess (stictly a guess), though, is that he simply means the Orthodox and any other small groups (e.g., Old Catholics) who have valid sacraments. (Marc and I were discussing the relationship of validity to efficacy in these schismatics' sacraments just the other day). If correct, that language would be more technical (or juridical, if you will, vis-a-vis 65) and less sweeping than our American ears naturally hear.
2) Re 103: The "movements of grace" may refer not to grace sufficient for salvation, but only to the grace of conversion, which must result in them becoming Catholic. For 103 goes on to use language that reaffirms the point of 65 in language that you omitted to quote: "Therefore may they enter into Catholic unity and, joined with Us in the one, organic Body of Jesus Christ . . . ."
3) Re 104, that could be explained as a recognition that there is no such thing as a forced conversion. The language about being "forced to go into a Church" not making you Christian seems to support that interpretation. I also think there's a logical difference in a) not being forced to be Catholic and b) being free to proclaim a non-Catholic faith. But I have not time to give that further thought today.
But I repeat: the above is merely sparring for sparring's sake. You admirably took up my challenge and have presented some very credible positions. In doing so you've shown that it in fact may be possible to do what the hierarchy insists is the case re the hermeneutic of continuity, at least concerning subsistence.
So why isn't the hierarchy addressing the problem in such terms? Instead, it speaks (and worse, often acts) as if there is no document called Mystici Corporis--that there is only "a kind of society that finds its origin and growth in charity." That's the essential problem: not that the statements can't be reconciled but that the hierarchy won't do it, and in failing to do it essentially negates all statements prior to VII that seem to contradict the texts of VII. It talks of continuity, and embraces rupture.
Thanks again!
Anon 5: Thank you for your gracious reply to my comment. I am sorry I could not respond sooner but it has been a very busy day.
My sole aim in the comment was indeed to try to show that, as you put it, “it in fact may be possible to do what the hierarchy insists is the case re the hermeneutic of continuity.” To do more than that would require extensive study and analysis of all the pertinent documents regarding the contested issues. But perhaps this little exercise suggests that we can have more confidence in Vatican II, as properly understood, than some might think.
I can only speculate that the hierarchy is not addressing the problem in such terms for general consumption by the faithful because this would require an exhaustive exegesis of a great deal of dense material. Instead, perhaps they consider it is sufficient to communicate the end result of the reasoning process they have been going through instead of sharing all the detailed and difficult reasoning that leads up to their conclusions. Perhaps an analogy is that it is a bit like being given the court’s ruling but not the court’s reasoning. Normally only lawyers are trained to understand the reasoning properly. Similarly, we laity are not properly trained in the techniques of reasoning that need to be applied to magisterial documents. Does that make some kind of sense as a possible explanation?
That said, perhaps some citations to relevant passages in earlier documents might be helpful in helping to overcome reservations. But then again, perhaps those citations exist. Moreover, there are probably detailed exegeses by expert theologians that are available if we wanted to find them. I claim no expertise or deep knowledge of the relevant materials. Indeed, I am learning much that is new to me from researching matters under discussion on the Blog.
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