Bishop Jozef De Kesel is no stranger to our readers. Rorate Caeli blogged about what could be construed as a heretical statement that he made shortly after his installation as the Bishop of Bruges, Belgium. Last week, In Caelo translated some gloomy remarks on Vatican II and its aftermath (see below) that were attributed to him by the Dutch website Rorate. (You read that right.)
Emphases mine.
Emphases mine.
“The renewal that the Council had heralded so promising, has not come to pass, at least not to the scale that people had imagined. The Council pleaded for a greater openness to modern culture. And rightly so. But modern culture unavoidably means a secular culture and a secular culture equally unavoidably means a non-Christian culture. That is something that the Council and the following post-conciliar renewal has insufficiently recognised. On the contrary, it sooner thought that openness to modern culture would lead to a return to an admittedly modern, but yet also Christian culture. Which did not happen. Which obviously did not happen. A much more fundamental process of change in western culture was what it was about. It was not, and still is not only about a Church which was to adapt to the new culture. It was about this culture, as a culture, bidding farewell to Christianity. And for Christianity this does not mean the end, but the end of a status that it had had here for centuries: that of a cultural religion, the religion that grounded culture and held it together and was therefore universally recognised and accepted. The Council itself could do nothing about this process of change, which was not on the agenda of the Council. It is a process of change that started long before the Council and which continued after the Council. The question remains not so much how the Church should continue to adapt to modern culture, but what it means to be Church in a modern and therefore thoroughly secular, non-Christian world.
We continue to think that, if the Church would reach out to modern culture, that that culture would once again stand up for her. We are still searching for the adapted liturgy of the new language which would finally solve the problem of the loss of relevance of Christianity. But it remains to be seen if we will ever find it. In that way we keep on suffering from a fundamental and unspoken frustration in our pastoral work, our way of being Church and of Church renewal.
It is not right that a Church which consistently modernises would again convince everyone. It is hard and painful to accept that the Gospel is no longer considered relevant for everyone. A Church that is more consistently adapted to modernity will not lead to a return to the past. It will never again be like the past. In a lengthy process of which Vaticanum II was merely a symptom, the west had not only bid farewell to a certain unadapted form of Christian, but has Christianity steadily ceased to be the cultural religion of western civilisation.”
