Even here there is need for a new evangelization, which is why I propose you intensely live the Year of Faith, which will begin in October, 50 years from the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The Council documents contain an enormous wealth for the formation of new generations of Christians, for the formation of our conscience. So read them, read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and rediscover the beauty of being Christians, of being Church to enjoy the great “we” that Jesus has formed around him, to evangelize the world: the “we” of the Church, never closed, but always open and projected towards the proclamation of the Gospel.
Benedict XVI
July 15, 2012
45 comments:
The great "we" at my parish could care less.
Yes, get ready. We will get tons of this ad nauseam. In the land of the blind, one eye is king.
Yippee skippy hooray!
:-(
In so far as those documents repeat Traditional teaching, they are a source of formation and teaching that is wonderful. I would also say that the translations I have read, of say, LG, are quite beautiful in expressing the truth of the Faith.
We can't expect (can we?) that Benedict XVI will play the professor Cardinal while he is Vicar of Christ on earth, and discriminate the chaff from the real wheat of the Council.
I suspect that is part of his sacrfice offered to Our Lord these day: knowing that time, and above all, Grace, will heal the disaster that followed the Council, and misapplied pretty much everything.
90% of the Council's works have been accomplished and now only 10% to go before completing the remainder.
It took 50 years to accomplish 90%, so it will take another 5 years and half to accomplish the rest.
Groovy!
The Council of Trent proclaimed everything dogmatic we are obliged to believe.
All VII obliges us to believe is what it restated of Trent.
Everything else is non binding.
What was the us of the Council other than to sow confusion.
Quite the prelude to the anticipated FSSPX statement.
One wealth of the council was the recommendation to give pride of place to Latin and the Gregorian Chant normatively.
Putting a positive, if not quixotic, construction on Holy Father's words, perhaps he does wish "us" to rediscover this.
Sorry, Holy Father, when I hear of a great "we" my formed consciousness push me to re-read before "De unitate intellectus contra averroistas" of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
At the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday, the Holy Father made this unbelievable statement on the fruits of Vatican II:
“Anyone who considers the history of the post-conciliar era can recognize the process of true renewal, which often took unexpected forms in living movements and made almost tangible the inexhaustible vitality of holy Church, the presence and effectiveness of the Holy Spirit. And if we look at the people from whom these fresh currents of life burst forth and continue to burst forth, then we see that this new fruitfulness requires being filled with the joy of faith, the radicalism of obedience, the dynamic of hope and the power of love. ”
The house is burning down and the caretaker of the home is praising the fire.
"One wealth of the council was the recommendation to give pride of place to Latin and the Gregorian Chant normatively"
Many of the previous other Councils of the Church did this as well, and in much more clear terms.
"of being Church to enjoy the great “we” that Jesus has formed around him, to evangelize the world:" Being Church? is that really what he said. I thought I belonged to the Church militant. Certainly the only WE that matters is those with whom I sahre the Faith. Not my Faith, Not our Faith...but the Faith...of history and in continuity. But how do I work that out reading Vatican II. Often the translation like the Mass was isn't accurate. Certainly without grasping what the Catholic Faith in continuity is how? The new Catechism. Am I supposed to accept that now as well? It is just a tool that is revised often!
The Pope demonstrates that FSSPX is urgently needed within the church and not as a dismissable "sect" outside of it!
Depressing indeed, like what he was saying 50 years ago.
It would be so much easier to be a Mormon.
How does one say, "Hey man, we be Church", in Latin? "Can I come with? Groovy, man."
Where have all the massgoers gone? Long time paaaaaasing.
P.K.T.P.
Does the Year of Faith have an official song yet? If it is to double as a celebration of the Second Vatican Council, I have a suggestion.
Orestes said...
It would be so much easier to be a Mormon.
You've got to quit listening to or watching too much Glenn Beck!
Dear Holy Father,
Permit me to say, with filial respect, that hardly anyone is reading current Church documents let alone the ones from the Second Vatican Council. I tried to give some of your Holiness' encyclicals to my fellow parishioners as well as other Papal documents - and guess what happened? NOTHING! In fact, I was treated with disdain and distrust. The parish I used to frequent is no longer really Catholic, Holy Father. It is quite alarming. People, including the priest make things up as they go along - there is hardly any reverence for the Blessed Sacrament and certainly no discussions on the Catholic view of moral issues and the non-negotiables. This parochial situation, I have come to understand, is far from rare.
If it hadn't been for my discovery of your Holiness' gift to the Church - Summorum Pontificum(at least to this poor needy Catholic - it has been an enormous grace) - I cannot imagine where I would be now. So thank you, once again, Holy Father for this Motu Proprio. I pray with all my heart that your Holiness will ORDER all your bishops and priests to stop blocking Summorum Pontificum and restore the Traditional Latin Mass as a normal, integral part of Catholic life once again.
May Our Lord richly bless you Holy Father!
Barbara
Enough with the damn council!
"We live in evil times? We are the times."--St. Augustine
Let us be careful of interpreting the Holy Father's words in the worst possible light. The Church Fathers, Clement, Irenaeus, Jerome, Augustine, Origin, Tertullian, etc., all saw a horizontal perspective to our Holy Faith...sure, EVERY 70s piece of music that does a "We are Church" variation should be universally banned...but really, let's not twist the Pope's words...let's not make the Wine of Cana into vinegar...for that sourness will be coming from within us.
Yeah. That reconciliation between the SSPX and Rome is lookin' real good! (Not.)
Vatican II was a tragedy of epic proportions. The documents that proceeded from Vatican II should all be confiscated and burned; their ashes should be dissolved in acid, and the acid should be neutralized and poured into a volcano. The crematorium for destroying those documents should be dismantled and the earth under it salted. And, anyone involved in the process should be re-catechized with a traditional Catechism, just for good measure.
"of being Church"
Did he really say this? Can we see the original?
Click on the link, friend, it is the News.va translation. We modified "consciousness" to "conscience", but it is a reasonable translation. As for "being Church," yes he said, "essere Chiesa", as you can find out yourself if you browse around the Vatican website - or you cannot find it yourself?
Once again I'm reminded of these immortal words of Abp. Lefebvre:
"At the close of a long life (for I was born in 1905 and I now see the year 1990), I can say that it has been marked by exceptional world events: three world wars, that which took place from 1914 to 1918, that which took place from 1939 to 1945, and that of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. The disasters caused by these three wars, and especially by the last of them, are incalculable in the domain of material ruins, but even more so in the spiritual realm. The first two paved the way for the war inside the Church...."
-Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Spiritual Journey, Prologue
Would it be impious to suggest that perhaps Pope Benedict XVI has now, at this late stage in his life, entered Manchurian Candidate territory?
Shane, thank you for directing us to that 1963 speech of Joseph Ratzinger. Yes, this is clearly the same man, not a manchurian candidate. To wit:
"the dangerous archaism which imprisoned the liturgy of the Mass since the Council of Trent."
Vatican II was a supreme failure. Now Own it! The Great We has spoken.
RJH
A review of the extra supplementary documents (i.e. the love letters of Fr. Karl Rahner) that were being produced prior to, during, and post the VII council may be called for, as their content touches on the theological and the state of mind of Rahner. Maybe with these letters we can understand the context of the VII Council as well as its concept of the perplexing "we" Church phenomena.
The kettle was already boiling before the Council, the water spilled after the Council. The Council was not the cause but just a symptom. Either we accept it as valid or reject it and become sedevacantists.
Mother Angelica, (the foundress of the EWTN, the world's first global Catholic television, radio and internet network) who became the champion of orthodox Catholicism in the early 1990's, after she condemend a woman playing Jesus in the Stations of the Cross at World Youth Day, in Denver said the same thing.
She said, "Reading the documents of Vatican II, is like reading Sacred Scripture", and lamented the fact that these documents had been used to justify all sorts of innovation in church life.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre wrote a letter to Paul VI in 1977 saying he was prepared to accept all the documents of Vatican II, if he could interpret them in the light of tradition.
Pope Benedict has pretty much said the same thing when he contrasts the "hermeneutic of continuity", with the "hermeneutic of rupture", in regard to their intepretation.
Anything that is is ambiguous in the Council documents, we must go back to earlier, clearer statments, to find their proper meaning, regardless of what liberal Council Fathers with their aggiornamento were entusiastic about.
As Mr John Lamont, a Catholic theologian in Australia has pointed out, the Society of St Pius X accepts about 95% of conciliar teaching, a far greater number than most theologians in the Western Church.
It is true that in the decades following the Council, the Church experienced a terrible decline in terms of church attendance, priestly and religous vocations, and loyalty to the Church's Magisterium, by the average worshipper in the pews. An impoverished liturgy did not help things either.
But was that the problem of the Council itself, or erroneous interpretations of it as Pope Benedict, seems to be saying?
Perhaps instead of condeming the Council all the time, it is time for us to go back to the documents themselves, and discover their hidden riches. For instance in Lumen Gentium, Chapter 8, no Council has ever talked as gloriously of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Even though we have our life jackets on as we struggle in the waters, let us cling to the man guiding the Barque of Peter through this travail. Nobody else can take his place.
Mikhail Gorbachev thought that Communism was reformable, could be purged of the Stalinism that followed Lenin's supposedly "pure" Marxism.
But Lenin was just a stone-hearted mass murderer too of course.
Similarly, without issuing an authoritative document or series of documents showing how and why the disputed Vatican II documents are in line with Catholic Tradition, the Pope's appeals to them are just so much empty air.
The truth is that if the Magisterium refuses to issue such an authoritative teaching, it is because it is unable to do so: there IS no "continuity" between the before the Council and the Council itself.
The Pope's trying to sell us a bag marked "Guggi, Made in China" as a real Gucci item.
It doesn't work.
Ferraiuolo,
Rejecting those parts of the council that are non-binding, i.e. all but the sentences that repeat previous doctrine, does not a sedevecantist make. Sedevecantist means to reject the legitimacy of the pope (sedevecantist = the seat is vacant).
Shane said:
"Depressing indeed, like what he was saying 50 years ago." And then Shane provided an invaluable must-read link to Peritus Fr. Ratzinger"s report on VC2 for a Catholic magazine. We see from this document that in those times the intention to destroy the Traditional Liturgy was the central issue right from the beginning.
The Bishops brought to this untimely Council decades of pent-up resentment to the Latin Liturgy. They really intended to do to us what they did. It was not just the Freemason Bugnini working in the shadow of Paul VI in the Vatican for years after the council that destroyed our Latin Mass. These misguided 2500 bishops of this time really, really wanted to foist this disater upon us. Their initial decision was on the Liturgy and from there all the rest flowed.
Our duty here in Rorate Caeli is to teach Catholics that this wrong must be righted. We must stand athwart the modernist stream of tambourine massses and offer a serious alternative in the TLM.
Benedict XVI gave us this opportunity with Summorum Pontificum. We have to use this Law of the Church to carry out a rearguard action to keep the Church Holy. Every time we attend the Extraordinary Mass, or serve, or sing in the thousands of choirs that have surged in the last five years, each one of us makes an important contribution. We are building it, and they are coming.
The celebration of the awful anniversary of VC2 in October will be a bitter pill to swallow, but it will pass. We must keep trying to convince the Holy Father that only priests that offer both the Forma Ordinaria and Extraordinaria are qualified to become Bishops. There are two Liturgies in the Roman Faith and a bishop should know both. A few good bishops could make a huge difference to the restoration of the Faith of the Church.
The start of the Year of Faith will also be a good time to lobby for a Personal Prelature for Traditional Priest Societies and Una Voce/Diocesan/Summorum priests that wish to offer the Forma Extraordinaria in our Church. This Prelature could afford some protection from the most recalcitrant bishops who are currently disobeying the Pope's Laws of the Church.
Una Voce/LMS/FSSP/ICR types will have to work harder, but time and God are on our side.
I keep reading that no one has read the documents of VII or the new Catechism, and that this is why it is not fair to point to it as the marshalling master plan that brought about the current issues in the Church.
So since I had to read the documents of VII and the new Catechism as part of my courses, here's my own subjective opinion of them:
-They are ambiguous at best
-They lead to multiple interpretations. My professors always favoured the "rupture" interpretation.
-Not all interpretation are compatible with Tradition.
-The language used is similar to the PC and the compromise language of the 20th century used politics.
-For the average person who is not equipped with the new language of theology that emerged with modernism, they can easily get confused or loose track of the nuances and subtleties along the way while reading.
It's hard to recognise any relation to reality in these words of the Holy Father. Although, I'm sure that someone will accuse me of a "lack of trust" in the Pope for saying that. But here in Scotland I see little but decay and decline in the Church being marketed as "renewal". And woe betide those priests and teachers in Catholic schools who beg to differ.
For any Catholic who has read the works of the political scientist Eric Voegelin (in The New Science of Politics and ) a shudder must surely go down the spine when reading these words of our present Holy Father, which is just one in a series panegyrics about the Second Vatican Council by the members of the magisterium. Right from the early days of the Council we have seen the imposition of what Voegelin calls a "secondary reality" - a fiction that is presented as reality - that has been built on a foundation of shibboleths and taboos. The parallels with coercive utopian regimes with their stage-managed self-celebration are unmistakable. To hear modern churchmen talking in ecstasies about the great "conciliar event" is not so different from Maoists praising the Great Leap Forward. Except the Maoists have finally given up their jubilation in the face of cold reality.
As Voegelin noted such "fictitious realities" are sustained through the prohibition of questions. Indeed, as a convert to the Church, I fairly soon realised that there were certain questions that were discouraged. Further, even perceptions about the reality of the state of the Church were unwelcome. There were implied warnings that to continue in a certain line of questioning or thought was to invite ostracisation. Thankfully, since I am not a priest, religious, or teacher there was no Gulag Archipelago waiting for me! Nevertheless, it was profoundly distressing to find so much hostility to sincere questions in a Church - in the Church - in which I expected to find a great love of the truth. Instead I found - what I now realise was - libido dominandi.
Eric Voegelin used the term "Gnostic" to describe the attempt to erect a "dream world" as a means of manipulating reality. He saw a continuity of attitude from the early Gnostics through its medieval recrudescence in the person of Joachim of Flora up to the coercive utopians of the 20th Century. Indeed, it is not entirely inappropriate to describe a Gnostic spirit having entered the Church at the time of the Council. The attitude that the laity are somehow unable to understand the complexities of theology and are therefore incapable of recognising heresy on the part of churchmen (thus a de facto division of the Church into an esoteric inner circle and an exoteric outer circle) and that there is core of truth common to all the world religions which are approximations of that truth (which I heard from the lips of a Polish priest defending the Assisi Gatherings: "They are for people of a high spirituality").
Another philosopher, this time Joseph Pieper, talked about (in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power) the tendency to corrupt language for the purpose of coercion and manipulation. I think it is through this very corruption of the spoken and the written word that this illusion of a "New Springtime" has been most effectively been imposed on the Catholic faithful. In these words of Pope Benedict XVI "renewal", "vitality", "life" are used to refer to a situation of profound decadence in the Church. The Holy Father says there is renewal ergo there must be renewal.
Finally, to draw upon another philosopher - Plato - we can see in this terrible crisis of the Church a demonstration of the Metaphor of the Cave (in The Republic) in which the captives take illusion for reality and wish to destroy (in our case through calumny or ostracism) those who would tarnish the beauty of their cherished illusion.
There was a problem with my HTML.
The relevant books by Eric Voegelin are The New Science of Politics and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.
I fear, indeed, there is more to contend with than simply erroneous applications and interpretations. There is genuine hatred against the traditional Latin mass, and against the traditional devotional life of the Christian.
There was a semiotic devastation in the vineyard, meaning that every area of signification--art and architecture, music, calendar,--was tampered with. The documents of VII and the Catechism were written in such a way as to seem consistent with previous doctrines while leaving the door wide open to the opposite interpretation. At the very least, this dilutes the force of the statement; at the worst, it insinuates the opposite meaning. From my study of Soviet literature, I immediately recognized this famous form of linguistic double talk. Known as "Aesopian language", it was the wide practice of Soviet dissidents and authors who managed to express dissent in apparent panegyrics to authority.
Again, the ecumenical movement is loud in its appeal to "dialogue"--a philosophical term elevated by the Soviet philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, who also wrote about double-voicing and polyphony.
It does not really take special training to penetrate the murky waters, just Christian instincts.
Dear Mr Werling. That comment seems to indicate that y'all ain't part of the "we,"
And why the objection to "we" as descriptive on His Church? Its use is quite traditional.
Here is the Catechism of the Council of Trent:
"Church"
In common Scripture usage, however, the word was subsequently employed to signify the Christian society only, and the assemblies of the faithful; that is, of those who are called by faith to the light of truth and the knowledge of God, that, having forsaken the darkness of ignorance and error, they may worship the living and true God piously and holily, and serve Him from their whole heart. In a word, The Church, says St. Augustine, consists of the faithful dispersed throughout the world.
The liberal principles of the 1789French Revolution were adopted by the ecclesiastics during Vatican II Council. The famous phrase of Cardinal Suenens affirmed it clearly: "Vatican II is 1789 in the Church." This formula, never retracted, is exact.
So exactly what treasures do the Second Vatican Council documents contain, other than those treasures we already enjoyed from before the council, and are re-stated in the council documents?
I can't seem to come up with a single one...
A great wealth?
I won't be reading Vatican II this coming year.
I'll continue reading my Bible. That's wealth.
--Zak
Your Holiness:
I am not "Church", nor am I "tree", "2012 Astin-Martin" or "biscuit". I am merely a simple man and a member of the Catholic Church.
With deepest thanks...
"The Council documents contain an enormous wealth."
Wealth of what, ambiguity, disconnects with the two-thousand years of Doctrine and Sacred Tradition, the dismissing of aeseticism as repressive of the human spirit...?
Post a Comment