I really like the Pillar. It tells the truth to power and then power reacts. That’s great. However, Ed Condon and J.D. Flynn better watch out. Vatican II’s call for the laity to take their rightful place in the Church, like teaching the truth and reporting the truth, might be rolled back by Pope Francis if Ed Condon’s commentary which I link below is true. Pope Francis seems not so much to be enamored with the spirit of Vatican II or even its actual documents, but with the spirit of Vatican I and papal micromanagement of bishops as branch managers under the authority of the Roman Curia of which the pope is the boss.
We all know there is a sort of incoherence, well not sort of of, radical incoherence actually, to Pope Francis’ papacy. Some would call this “Gaslighting” from the remake of a 1930’s movie in the 1940’s, a really great movie by the way and the remake better than the first one.
Press the Pillar’s title for the entire commentary. I have a money byte below the title:
Does Roche’s rescript dispense with Vatican II?
Tuesday's rescript answers some questions about Traditionis custodes, but raises even more about the reality vs theory of Pope Francis’ signature reforms.
The council’s dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, emphasized that within the bounds of ecclesial communion, “the pastoral office, or the habitual and daily care of their sheep, is entrusted to [the diocesan bishop] completely.”
Explaining that local bishops are successors to the apostles in their own right, the council taught that bishops are not “to be regarded as vicars of the Roman Pontiffs, for they exercise an authority that is proper to them.”
Vatican II’s texts had been understood in previous pontificates to be aimed at decentralizing ecclesiastical governance authority - in light of the Church’s theology of the episcopate - after centuries of concentrated authority in Rome - and as an essential complement to the emphasis on the papacy expressed in Vatican I.
In Christus dominus, St. Paul VI’s decree on the pastoral office of bishops, the pope who closed the Second Vatican Council emphasized that “To bishops, as successors of the Apostles, in the dioceses entrusted to them, there belongs per se all the ordinary, proper, and immediate authority which is required for the exercise of their pastoral office.”
For this reason, St. Paul VI wrote, “The general law of the Church grants the faculty to each diocesan bishop to dispense, in a particular case, the faithful over whom they legally exercise authority as often as they judge that it contributes to their spiritual welfare, except in those cases which have been especially reserved by the supreme authority of the Church.”
Yet, under Pope Francis, those special cases appear to be becoming increasingly common, even while the pope has aimed his curial reforming efforts in the opposite direction, towards “sound decentralization.”
The result appears to be a new willingness to stretch the essential link between the exercise of governance in the Church and pastoral care of souls, meant to be bound up together in the office of the diocesan bishop.
And that’s where the pope could face questions. If rescripts like the one granted to Cardinal Roche this week become a normal part of Vatican governance, it could leave Francis with a set of bishops asking whether his legacy embodies the texts of Vatican Council II, or the spirit of Vatican I.
3 comments:
Fr McDonald, the freedom given the local bishops was snapped up and hastened forward to be exactly where we are today, in a heterodox, if not open schism with the Church. Paul outlined, in several entries of the previous post on The Pope’s response to the Pillar how this appeared at the parish level. He captured well the attitude of Vatican II as an event rather any specific guidance. I am not alone, i am sure, in seeing parishes wrecked and being told that it was per the directions of Vatican II. It seems to me that Vatican II is like some ancient Druid pool where the True Believer can find whatever he seeks but at horrible cost.
The Pope is attempting to turn bishops into branch managers, a clear violation of the letter and spirit of Vatican II as well as 2000 years of ecclesiology preceding the Council. But the Pope is “holy, holy, holy” to the useful idiots
Here is one commentators take on the rescriptum obtained by old Arthur:
"What the rescriptum does is to take even more power away from the bishops. The question is how such a document will go down with the bishops, whatever their orientation, since the Roman Curia blatantly interferes in the government of their own dioceses. What police power will the Dicastery of Worship have to enforce this new prescription? What will they do to a bishop who, for example, designates a parish church to celebrate the traditional Mass without Rome's permission? Will they throw them out? The bishops do not want problems with their faithful, so they will not easily obey the whims of a less than mediocre cardinal. The same thing will happen that used to happen when a bishop made problems for priests to celebrate the Latin Mass: the complaints would reach the Ecclesia Dei commission, the latter would call the bishop and then he would continue doing what he wanted, and nobody would or could do anything to him. "
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