Continuity, Rupture or Both? Vatican II and the SSPX
Guest article by James Baresel
Twenty years ago, Pope Benedict XVI gave his well-known address on interpreting Vatican II with a “hermeneutic of continuity” rather than a “hermeneutic of rupture.” Welcome as that seemed, details were never explained, distinctions never made, ways that forms of rupture can exist beside forms of continuity ignored.
At the most obvious level, any infallible teachings promulgated by Vatican II must be in continuity with tradition. (No dogmatic definitions infallible in and of themselves were promulgated.) The continuity of non-infallible teachings must be considered probable. Were that the beginning and end of the matter, the Society of Saint Pius X’s condemnation of Vatican II as a break with tradition would constitute a simple refusal to give its teachings due submission.
Infallible teachings are guaranteed to be capable of an orthodox interpretation in their precise wording and no more. Nothing absolutely assures that their orthodox sense will be immediately apparent. Nothing prevents them from being ambiguous. Nothing prevents them from being open to heterodox interpretations (“Christ is true man” can be understood in both Catholic and Arian ways). Nothing prevents popes and councils from promulgating teachings whose wording is technically orthodox but which are intended to undermine orthodoxy in practice.
Using technical orthodoxy to undermine actual orthodoxy was the professed intention of some of Vatican II’s most influential figures. Edward Schillebeeckx admitted that “we have used ambiguous terms during the Council and we know how we shall interpret them afterwards.” Cardinal Joseph Suenens insisted that “Vatican II is the French Revolution in the Church” and that “one cannot understand the French or the Russian revolutions unless one knows something of the old regimes which they brought to an end… It is the same in church affairs: a reaction can only be judged in relation to the state of things that preceded it.” Yves Congar claimed that “the Church has had, peacefully, its October Revolution,” alluding to the Bolshevik uprising in 1917. And so on.
After decades of rampant heresy, it can be hard to realize just how shockingly unusual it is for a council’s participants to oppose the Church’s “old order.” On the rare occasions when this happened in the past, the innovators were crushingly defeated. Disputes typically concerned only the old order’s authentic meaning. Athanasius and Arius fought tooth and nail because each believed he was defending tradition. The same was true of both proponents and opponents of papal infallibility at Vatican I. Rejection of those councils’ infallible dogmatic pronouncements equates to rejection of the Church’s magisterial authority.
Rejecting Vatican II’s non-infallible teachings is a different and less serious problem. It does not deny the principle that most non-infallible teaching will be true. It does not deny that each non-definitive teaching must be presumed true as a general rule. What it does deny is that such a presumption must exist in the case of non-infallible teachings strongly influenced by heterodox churchmen, which were intended to undermine orthodoxy and whose orthodox meaning may not be readily apparent—denies, in other words, the mere probability that God will overcome heterodox human intentions to preserve from technical error even those magisterial documents whose orthodoxy is not absolutely assured.
What we have is a situation comparable to a hypothetical “Anti-Nicene Council” at which “closet Arians” secured the promulgation of non-dogmatic texts whose omissions, ambiguities, and one-sided emphasis on Christ’s humanity did not technically contradict the Nicene dogmas but had the practical effect of undermining them.
Had a faithful bishop from Gaul (let us call him Marcellus) participated in such council, condemned the intentions behind it, wrongly insisted that an orthodox interpretation was impossible, been deposed due to the influence of heretics, retreated to an Alpine village to train and ordain priests loyal to the dogmas of Nicaea, and eventually consecrated bishops to continue his work, few would consider him guilty of worse than an understandable technical misunderstanding—and he would probably be a canonized saint remembered for his defense of orthodoxy.
A lesser form of de facto rupture is found even in orthodox interpretations of Vatican II and many subsequent changes—including the Missal of Paul VI, communion in the hand, female altar servers, one-sided emphasis on elements of truth in other religions and downplaying of their erroneous nature, equally one-sided emphasis on the need to assist the poor and silence on the value of social hierarchy, creation of a new set of mysteries for the Rosary, complete opposition to capital punishment and war in practice despite recognizing their legitimacy in principle, near elimination of mandatory penances, and so on.
Many of these changes are in and of themselves significant ruptures with centuries and centuries of tradition, the totality of them an even more dramatic break with the past—a thorough re-creation and reordering of Catholic practice which ignores and overturns countless generations of saints, popes, general councils, and ordinary pious Catholics in a way that would, prior to the mid-twentieth century, universally have been considered unreasonable, presumptuous, and (at best) a de facto attack on orthodoxy. That a handful of the most minor changes may have been reasonable enough in isolation is beside the point.
Unimpeachably orthodox defenses of this “regime of change” typically demonstrate only that specific changes contain nothing intrinsically and strictly incompatible with Catholic doctrine—or, at most, promote them on the basis of arguments developed ex post facto by individuals who had initially hoped to prevent their introduction. Churchmen responsible for the changes were generally either heterodox or uncomfortable with particular Catholic teachings whose practical impact they hoped to mitigate as much as orthodoxy might allow.
Instead of simple continuity or simple rupture, what we have is minimal technical continuity with traditional doctrine put at the service of de facto rupture in both theology and practice. Ecclesial authorities who want the SSPX to accept one side of the coin must finally acknowledge and confront the other.
