PART
II
THE COUNCIL AND THE ECLIPSE OF GOD
Beatissimae Vergini Mariae humillime dedicatum,
Quae
cunctas haereses sola interemisti in universo mundo
A.
Historical
Introduction
The 20 Councils prior to the
Second Vatican Council had all been convened in order to extinguish the chief heresy or evil of the time: through
an ever deeper and clearer enunciation of Church doctrine. This Council was
different on two counts: first, in that it was not occasioned by any
contemporary heresy or evil, and second (as we have already noted above), in
that it was not dogmatic. It nowhere used the formula by which dogma is
infallibly defined, and moreover did not present itself as a dogmatic, but
rather as a ‘pastoral’ council, understanding pastorality as a matter of action
and reform. Pope Paul VI stated in a General Audience that: ‘differing from
other Councils, this one was not directly dogmatic, but doctrinal and pastoral’.
One might say that it was dogmatic indirectly
inasmuch as it contained dogmatic statements which had been declared in
previous Councils, but that it did not define, and did not intend to define,
any new dogma.
Sufficient doctrinal grounds
for convening a Council would in fact have existed in the expansion of
Modernism, ‘the sum total of all heresy’, or even sufficient pastoral grounds
in the growth of Communism and of the spirit of impurity of the 1960’s, and yet
the Council was not minded to combat these evils, but rather to implement a
program of reform both ad intra and ad extra: both within the Church and in
the relations of the Church to the outside world.
The fact that the Council
defined its own character in contradistinction to the previous, dogmatic
Councils is manifest in its avoidance of dogmatic definitions and its use of
discursive language ,
as we shall presently see, but on a deeper level, in its skepticism towards the
Truth.
This fact also recalls Marx’s primacy of ‘praxis’ over Truth: ‘It is in praxis that
man must demonstrate truth, that is reality and power, the world-orientedness
of his thought’. As Professor de Mattei explains: ‘Praxis, that is the
historical outcome of political action, is for Marx the supreme criterion of
the truth of ideas, because action implicitly contains doctrine, even without
enunciating it’ . Am Anfang war die Tat .
The two future Popes of the Second Vatican Council:
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini
The idea of a General (or
‘Ecumenical’) Council was presented by Pope John XXIII as ‘an impulse of Divine
Providence’,
‘like a flash of heavenly light, shedding sweetness in eyes and hearts’
at which the ashes of St. Peter and his other holy predecessors thrilled ‘in
mystic exultation’; by Pope Paul VI it was similarly described as the effect of
‘divine inspiration’ ,
but the consequences that it was to have for the Church and the World tell
another story.
The inception of Council
proceedings was marked by three victories for what Father Wiltgen calls ‘the
Rhine Group’ . The
first was the postponement of the elections of candidates to the Council
commissions; the second was the placing of hand-picked men in these posts; and
the third was the rejection of all the work done preparatory to the Council.
Cardinal Josef Frings
The first victory was achieved after a meeting of the German Bishops in
the house of Cardinal Frings, where it was decided that the intervention to
frustrate the election process should be made by the non-German Cardinal
Liénart of Lille . The
text was prepared by Monsignori Garrone and Ancel on the night before the first
session of the Council. On the following day, Cardinal Liénart duly asked
Cardinal Tisserant, who was acting as President, if he could intervene, and
when the latter informed him that it was against the rules, he took the
microphone and spoke nonetheless; his proposition was seconded by Cardinal
Frings in the name of other German Bishops, to the accompaniment of applause
from the floor, with the result that the election process was effectively
interrupted and the first session closed after less than 50 minutes. ‘That was
our first victory’, called a Dutch Bishop to a friend as he left St. Peter’s .
‘A happy and dramatic turn of events’ commented Cardinal Suenens in his diary,
‘and audacious violation of the rule! The destiny of the Council was largely
decided at that moment, and Pope John was happy with it.’
Cardinal Lienart
As to the second victory, the Rhine group drew up a list of candidates in the
Anima College, the German House of
Studies, under the presidency of the same Cardinal Frings, and began a process
of lobbying on the 19th October, the day following the first
session. Cardinal Heenan explained that many Fathers relied on this list, there
being insufficient time to investigate the suitability of the various
candidates for the Commission work, Monsignor Lefebvre noting that all the
candidates were of the same (liberal) tendency. In the end 79 of the 109
candidates presented by the Rhine group were elected, and the Pope added a
further 8 of these candidates to the Commissions. Meanwhile the Rhine group
expanded, eventually to include the Bishops of Germany, Austria, Switzerland,
Holland, Belgium, and France. ‘After this election’, writes Father Wiltgen, ‘it
was not too hard to foresee which group was well enough organized to take over
the leadership of the Second Vatican Council. The Rhine had begun to flow into
the Tiber… the alliance
was able to operate effectively because it knew beforehand what it wanted and
what it did not want’ .
As to the third victory, it must first be explained that 2-3 years work prior
to the Council had been invested in preparatory schema containing some 2,000
pages and composed by 871 scholars. Their content was orthodox, as may already
be seen in the titles of the first four ‘dogmatic constitutions’: ‘Of the
Sources of Revelation’ ;
‘Preserving Pure the Deposit of the Faith’; ‘Christian Moral Order’; ‘Chastity,
Matrimony, the Family, and Virginity’ - ‘titles alone... sufficient to
send any self-respecting liberal screaming to his psychiatrist’ .
Father Marie Dominique Chenu
Father Chenu had written to Father Rahner
before the Council to express his sense of ‘affliction and sorrow’ at the
‘strictly intellectualist’ tenor of the schemas which limited itself to
denouncing ‘inter-theological errors… without reference to the dramatic
questions which men ask themselves, be they Christians or not, by reason of a
change of the human condition, external or internal, which has never recorded
by history… the Council is becoming a sort of intellectual clean-up operation
within the walls of scholasticism.’
Father Karl Rahner
Father Rahner exposed to
Monsignor Volk, Bishop of Mainz, his strategy of substituting the schemas
already prepared with a new one. The Prelate invited a number of German and
French Bishops and theologians to the house ‘Mater Dei’ on the same 19th
October on which the lobbying began, to determine how to put this strategy into
action. The meeting was animated and lasted over three hours. Bishop Volk
convoked a further meeting on the same premises a month later. The capital
importance of the second meeting was the introduction into the new schemes of a
different style of language. Cardinal Siri described it as a discursive
criterion: ‘… there was an exclusion of the method of simple, concise
propositions for the affirmation of truths or for the precise condemnation of
errors.’ Professor de Mattei remarks: ‘the choice of a discursive method had as
its principal consequence the lack of clarity, the cause, in its turn, of that
ambiguity which was the dominant note of the conciliar texts’.
Monsignor Volk, Bishop of Mainz
The outcome of the two
meetings was that the Dutch hierarchy issued a commentary in three languages,
the work of just one man, Father Schillebeeckx OP, which was presented to all
the Fathers as they arrived at the Council. It violently attacked the first
four schemas and proposed the fifth, the schema on the liturgy, for immediate
consideration. This schema, described by Father Schillebeeckx as ‘a true
masterpiece’ , was
the fruit of the only liberal-controlled Commission, that for Liturgical Reform
.
Two thirds of the Fathers, convinced by the Dominican’s stringent
argumentation, unsuspectingly accepted it. Such a majority would not in fact
have been sufficient to reject the preparatory schemes, but the European
Alliance succeeded in convincing the Pope to reject them notwithstanding .
Cardinal Ottaviani complained that the first scheme to be considered was not
doctrinal, as has been foreseen, but liturgical, but his remonstration went
unheeded .
Father Schillebeeckx
The First Session of the
Council, which was to comprise a mere six weeks of doctrinal discussion, closed
on December 8th 1962. Before the Second Session in September of the
following year under a new Pope, Bishops of various countries met for
discussions. While Bishops from other countries held their own meetings, the
Rhine group planned its strategy in Munich and in Fulda, on the initiative of
Cardinals Döpfner, Frings and König. Four Cardinals and 70 Archbishops and
Bishops took part, and were to arrive at the Second Session each with a
480-page plan in the hand. The theological expert who contributed most to the
work done at this meeting, on the documents on Revelation, The Blessed Virgin
Mary, and the Church, was Father Rahner, described by Cardinal Frings as ‘the
greatest theologian of this century’ .
Cardinal Konig
The press labeled the meeting
as ‘a conspiracy against the Roman Curia’ ,
and in the course of the same summer, Cardinals Suenens, Döpfner, and Lercaro
elaborated a project for taking away the supervision of the Council from the
Curia and giving it to four Cardinal ‘Moderators’. Pope Paul agreed, and
appointed to these rôles the three Cardinals just mentioned ‘universally known
for their reformist ardor’ ,
as well as the conservative, but ‘not very forceful’ ,
Cardinal Agagianian.
Cardinal Döpfner
Father Wiltgen sums up: ‘With
the Munich and Fulda conferences, the drastic changes that Pope Paul had made
in the Rules of Procedure, and the promotion of Cardinals Döpfner, Suenens, and
Lercaro to the position of Moderators, domination by the European Alliance (the
Rhine group) was assured.’
When Pope Paul agreed to allow additional members to the commissions, the
European Alliance set about ‘drawing up an unbeatable list. This work was
greatly facilitated since … the European alliance had expanded into a world
alliance’ .
They met every Friday evening and were ‘able to determine the policy of the
controlling liberal majority’ .
Their power was to be re-inforced when they succeeded in having all their own
candidates elected as additional commission members. Consequently ‘there was no
need for any-one to doubt the direction in which the Council was headed’ .
Cardinal Suenens
It would exceed the limits of
a critical book of this nature to recount much more of the history of the
Council. Let this brief introduction, together with those to subsequent
sections, suffice to present the context, and to shed light on the motives, for
the doctrines that we shall be examining.
Cardinal Lecaro
This first sketch already
evokes some of the most important protagonists in the drama: on the one side
those that we may call ‘the children of light’, amongst whom we have seen
Cardinal Ottaviani, the very symbol of the Roman Curia and Prefect of the
Congregation of the Holy Office ,
the Vatican organ responsible for the purity and the integrity of the Faith; on
the other side, ‘the children of the World’, a Freemason-studded cast: the
liberal (or ‘progressive’) theological experts and Bishops, principally of
French and German origin, well prepared and organized, and not shrinking from
unconstitutionality, or even from deceit, in their zeal to attain their ends;
in the center a Pope not endorsing the former group but acting as mediator and
conciliator between both. And so the scene is set for a drama that will bring
untold damage to the Hoy Church of God, the dynamics of which, like some vast
and infernal wheel, continue to thresh and to winnow humankind to this very
day.
C. The
Council’s Opposition to the Catholic Faith
We have said above that the
aim of this book is to show how the Council teaching opposes the Catholic
Faith. We use the neutral word ‘opposition’ not wishing to commit ourselves as
yet to describing the texts in question
as ‘errors’, ‘ambiguities’, or ‘attacks.’ We shall commit ourselves later after
having examined a sufficient number of such texts to make this assessment. We
shall proceed briefly to show:
- How the
Council opposes the Faith;
- How the
traditional World has responded;
- How the
present book responds;
- How the book
is structured in consequence.
- How the Council Opposes the Faith
The Council’s opposes the
Faith in two ways, verbally or tacitly: by what it says and by what it leaves
unsaid. The verbal opposition may be explicit or implicit. Explicit opposition
occurs when for instance the Council speaks of ‘churches’, which contradicts
Catholic teaching that there is only one church; implicit opposition occurs
when for instance the Council says that man is ‘the beginning … of every social
organization’
insinuating that State authority derives from the people. In the latter type of
instance interpretations may vary, but should always take account of the
context. The Council’s opposition to the Faith is tacit when it passes over a
Catholic doctrine in silence, as when it fails explicitly to condemn
contraception.
- How the Traditional World has Responded
Relatively little criticism
has been levelled against the Council in postconciliar times. Reaction to
conciliar heterodoxy from the side of canonically regular Traditionalist
institutes has typically been of a Neo-Conservative bent. Canonically irregular
institutes, by contrast, such as that of the Society of St. Pius X and of the
Sedevacantists, as well as the traditionalist laity, have been more forthright
and outspoken , in
the footsteps of Monsignor Lefebvre and of renowned lay commentators of the
past, such as Professor de Oliveira and Jean Madiran. The only Prelate in good
standing with Rome who has opposed the Council as a whole, and that in vigorous
terms, is, to date, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò - ad multos annos!
- How the Present Book Responds
To show up the deficiencies of
the Council we shall respond by rebutting them with Traditional Catholic
teaching, since Tradition, together with the Holy Scriptures, constitutes one
of the two sources of the Faith. When such a doctrine is defined as dogma, we
shall often quote that dogma itself, since Faith consists in its dogmas.
Clearly this is not to play off one magisterial document against another, like
bringing up a white knight to a red knight on a chess-board; but rather to show
in the light of Tradition and dogma, in other words in the light of Church
doctrine, which has remained unaltered for 2,000 years and has progressed only
in the depth and clarity of its expression, that the latter text is false.
- How the Book is Structured in Consequence
Now since the heterodox texts are
spread out over all the Council documents, the material on which we must work
are the Council documents as a whole. How should a work of this type be
structured? The most effective way to evaluate the texts in question will
clearly be to examine them according to their themes: not chronologically,
then, document by document, but rather thematically. Our criterion for
establishing the themes of the Council texts will be what we understand to be
the underlying intent of the Council, namely the desire to adapt the Church to
the World. We shall, however, begin our study with another issue, which, as we
shall see in the course of the book, is in fact the most fundamental issue at
stake in the whole Council, and that is the question of Truth.
We begin, then, by speaking of
Truth; thereafter we consider the Council’s teachings concerning the Church in
Herself, then concerning the Church’s relations to realities outside Herself:
first to the non-Catholic Christians, then to the other Religions, to the
State, and finally to the World; we subsequently consider the Council’s
teaching on man, as being that which colors its view of the Church and indeed
its whole world-view: this study will focus on man in himself, in his
realization by his life choice, and in relation to God, so furnishing us with
the opportunity also to examine Council teaching on marriage, the priesthood,
the consecrated life, and the Holy Mass; we conclude the book with an analysis
of the whole Council from the theological and philosophical standpoints, and a
brief summary of its dynamics and import on the most profound level.
The book is consequently
structured according to the following scheme:
Introduction: Truth
Part
I: the Church
I) The Church in Herself;
II) The Church in relation to
the non-Catholic Christians;
III) The Church in relation to
the other Religions;
IV) The Church and the State;
V) The Church and the World;
Part
II: Man
VI) Man in himself;
VII) Man as realized in his
choice of life;
VIII) Man in relation to God.
Conclusion
IX) Analysis of the Council;
X) Summary of findings.
