The Second Vatican Council: a Complex Problem
by Francesco Agnoli
Translated by Fr. Richard Cipolla
The Second Vatican Council remains, after forty years, an event that fosters enthusiasm and that causes division. There is a continual conversation about the Council: the progressives like Cardinals Martini, Mancuso, Melloni, etc., see the Council as the time of the birth of the Church; they call for a wider and more correct application of the Council; and they even ask for a Vatican III to open up the Church more to the world and to modern thought. The Pope reaffirms that the Second Vatican Council is not separated from that which preceded it. Monsignor Fellay, the superior of the Fraternity of S. Pius X, insists on his right to interpret such a Council in the light of Tradition, reserving for himself also to be able to criticize some passages considered ambiguous and some documents that he considers at least partially in contrast with preceding Magisterial statements. This position has been accepted by the Pope in so far as regarding the statutes of the traditionalist community of the Good Shepherd, to which has been given permission to criticize, with a constructive spirit, some controversial passages of the Council. Above all, finally, lay scholars like Roberto De Mattei, the author of a best seller like The Second Vatican Council: a History never written (Lindau), and theologians of great worth like Monsignor Brunero Gheradini, the author of The Second Vatican Council: A Conversation to be had, have launched the discussion in a praiseworthy way.
Personally, I do not have great competence to express myself, but I would like to set forth two concepts, hoping that they are useful to the debate, and hoping that I will not speak too nonsensically. If I do so, there will be someone to correct me in a fraternal manner. In reading some of the documents of the Council, I sometimes sense something that stupefies me through an excess of optimism. The Council was opened with the famous declaration of John XXIII against the “prophets of gloom and doom”. John XXIII believed fervently that our times were particularly favorable to a new “spring of the Church”, to a “leap forward”, to a “most splendid dawn”, of which the Council was a representative.
In this he broke away from the vision that Pius X and Pius XII had. They were more inclined to see in the world they lived in as an epoch of a progressing and terrible distancing from God. John XXIII wrote on the eighth of December 1962, at the closing of the first session of the Council: “it will be truly the new Pentecost that will make the Church flourish in her interior richness…it will be a new leap forward in the Reign of Christ in the world, a reaffirmation in a way ever deeper and persuasive of the good news of the Redemption, the light-filled annunciation of the sovereignty of God, of the brotherhood of man in love…” However, it did not go this way, as Cardinal Biffi has noted in his recent memoirs, and if the tree is seen by its fruit, today one can say that many signs of the times were badly interpreted. After the Council, thousands and thousands of priests were laicized, either to marry or even as a result of a crisis of faith. And time would not change anything.
The pontificate of Paul VI was very telling on this point. Montini was in fact often inspired to share the quasi-utopian optimism of John XXIII and to seek in a pastoral renewal a greater opening to the world as the main route for a new evangelization. But he was aware on many occasions, and he declared this with a quite openly, that instead of the springtime of the Church, winter had arrived: that the smoke of Satan had entered into the temple of God. He was convinced by the idea that the Council was the sign of “a spring-like awakening of immense spiritual and moral energy, as if lying in wait in the bosom of the Church”—this together with profound internal crises which he shared, among others, with Cardinal Siri in long conversations that were both private and dramatic. And it is in this way that some documents of the Council display here and there a certain naïve optimism that, according to Father Stanley Jaki, an esteemed friend of Benedict XVI, and according to Don Divo Barosotti and the rediscovered Romano Amerio, comes from an undervaluation of original sin and of the treachery of the spirit of the world, as understood in the Gospels.
This utopian optimism, I have said, is found for example at the beginning of the Declaration on Religious Liberty: “In the present age human beings are becoming ever more aware of the dignity of every person, and growing is the number of those who are calling for action on their own initiative, exercising their own responsible freedom, moved by a recognition of their duty and not pressed into service by coercive measures.” In “Gaudium et Spes” one reads phrases of this kind: “Never like today have men had a sense of liberty so acute….and so many people are arriving at a more acute sense of God…..The man of today is on the road to a fuller development of his personality to an ongoing discovery and affirmation of the rights proper to man.”
Analogous declarations, perhaps more polished and more detailed in the following passages, are found abundantly also in other encyclicals nearly from the same time, above all in the whole of Pacem in Terris. What harm does it do, someone asks, to be optimistic, to want to encounter the world in a persuasive way without high-sounding condemnations? What harm does it do to prefer “the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity”, as John XXIII always said, to fix one’s attention on updating (aggiornamento) rather than on the Tradition? In effect, who would not like, at least at first glance, a Christ less demanding, a Christ who would have come on the world’s terms, who had dialogued with his executors until he convinced them, and would not ask, also of his disciples, to fight against sin to the point, if necessary, of blood and martyrdom? A Christ who would not have reminded them that “you are in the world, but not of the world? “
Personally, I think that the lack of realism, the lack of a wise equilibrium between severity and mercy, often has negative consequences, because a diagnosis is always necessary for a cure, and for this reason the diagnosis should be implacable and true. “Its attitude”, wrote Paul VI on 7 December 1965, speaking about the Council, “has been very and deliberately optimistic. A stream of affection and admiration has been poured by the Council on the modern human being, preferring encouraging remedies to depressing diagnoses”. But what have been the consequences of all of this, of this attitude that is clearly something new in the history of the Church? How great has been the lack of proclaiming to the contemporary world an unvarnished analysis of its sickness, accompanied, of course, also by the mercy of the cure for this sickness? We are paying at this moment for the consequences of this extreme optimism. It has generated little by little in Catholics a mentality that is excessively acquiescent and irenical towards the world.
The idea that one should not “condemn”, that one must always dialogue to the bitter end, that the Church needs to be on the same journey as the world, has resulted in so many ways of being Catholic: Catholics for Marxism, Catholics for divorce, Catholics for abortion, Catholics who live by the slogan, “I don’t believe this is right, but I have no right to judge others who believe the opposite” and so forth. This results not in the peace of the Church, but rather, as is so apparent today, in discord between believers. One example above all others: the lack of a repudiation of Communism on the part of the Council fathers, not withstanding that petition of 450 of them, exactly at the time when persecutions were widespread and when that ideology of death was devastating whole peoples. This lack of response is the result of an unrealistic optimism, and of a mentality that, wanting to distance itself from the custom of anathemas of the past, believes (it seems to me disingenuously) that the dialogue with the world is the solution, painless and efficacious, for the redemption of mankind.
In this vision of dialogue, dialogue becomes not a means but an end: a dialogue that has as its purpose nothing other than the dialogue itself, instead of conversion, as if Christ himself had not chosen, in the last analysis, to witness to his divinity with his blood, and as if Christ had not told his disciples that persecution and martyrdom was in store for them. Can we possibly imagine a Council, this very day, in which Benedict XVI, so as to not quarrel with the world, refused to condemn cloning, abortion and genetic manipulation? And today, given the fact that the Pope fights like a lion in defense of man, from conception to natural death, can we still subscribe to the famous phrase of Paul VI according to which “the religion of the God who became man has encountered (at the Council) the “religion of man who has made himself God”, without something that would result in a “disagreement, a battle, an anathema”, but on the contrary an “immense sympathy”? Or is it not rather always clearer that the man who makes himself God is the perfect antithesis of the God who became man? And that, far from a representation of true humanism, the atheistic humanism of the world today ends up in devaluing man, reducing him to a monkey, to a “number that appears on a roulette wheel”, to an object that can be manipulated?
With this mentality present and underlying some passages of the Council documents, I would propose another consideration. Perhaps the desire itself to not to quarrel, to be more “pastoral”, to not use the lapidary and synthetic clarity of the Council of Trent, has resulted in the presence in some Conciliar documents of concepts that are not always clear, that are ambiguous, that leave room for divergent interpretations. Let us take as an example the Document on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redemptio. In this document there is repeated many times the Catholic doctrine that the Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ. It insists on the diverging doctrinal issues, for example, between Catholics and Protestants. It condemns as “alien to ecumenism” a “false irenicism”. All this is in line with preceding teaching of the Magisterium. But then, to illustrate the methods of dialogue, space is left, for example, for common prayer between Catholics and members of other confessions: “in ecumenical meetings it is licit, on the contrary even desirable, that Catholics join in prayer with their separated brethren”
But does not this generate confusion, indifferentism, a syncretistic mentality? Does it not have the effect of causing the faithful to forget the reality, or rather the importance, of the Church, of the communion with Rome and the Petrine primacy?
The Council Fathers continued: “All the same, the sharing in sacred worship must not be understood as a means to be used indiscriminately for the re-establishment of the unity of Christians… The importance of unity in addition forbids this sharing. But in some instances grace exhorts this sharing as a necessity. Concerning the way of going about this…. is the decision of the authority of the particular place…” But then to pray together by people of different faiths: is this something necessary or something ambiguous? Situations of this type, so murky, have generated, in the post-Conciliar period, great confusion, culminating, in my view, in the famous meetings in Assisi in 1986. There the faithful saw the name of Christ, He who is “the way, the truth and the life”, jumbled up indifferently with multiple and counterfeit divinities, in the city of a great saint, inside a consecrated church. The concrete effect was the broadening of indifference, encapsulated in that expression that became the fashionable thing to say in the mouth of many Catholics: “We are all sons of the same God”.
This expression is true in charity in the ultimate analysis, but extremely dangerous if used to make people believe that Christ, Buddha and Mohammed are the same thing. This expression contains in itself the key to the tragic situation of the post-Conciliar era: an ongoing diminishing among Catholics of their understanding of the obligation to announce Christ to all peoples, and of the responsibility that the gift of faith carries. At Assisi in 1986 two Cardinals preferred not to participate, sensing in that event a great danger for the Faith: Cardinal Giacomo Biffi and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who in a recent preface to a book by Marcello Pera has underlined how dialogue is possible and necessary between persons, between diverse cultures and peoples, but not between diverse religious and doctrinal concepts. These two Cardinals were on the same page as Pius XI, who in Mortalium annos had condemned “congresses, meetings and conferences, with a large public presence, to which every one is invited in a promiscuous manner, Catholics, heretics and representatives of other religions” in the name of “a false theory that supposes that all religions are good and praiseworthy”. To pray together, Pius XI thought, serves only to create confusion, to push people towards naturalism, and in the final analysis, to practical atheism, delegitimizing Revelation and the Church herself. That Benedict XVI today has decided to convoke a new Assisi does not change his position that he has taken in the past. For a person like me who does not understand certain things that are done, it can be imagined that at this new ecumenical assembly we will see a form very different from the one that preceded it. This can be seen already now in the fact that there will not be given places of worship to the representatives of other religions; and from the fact that atheists have also been invited. This shows that the gathering will not be founded on the idea that “all religions are good”, but on the idea that men, in so far as they are men, must talk to each other.
One final consideration: a reading of the Conciliar document on the Liturgy, whose letter has been totally disregarded by the Bugnini liturgical reform, lets one see, in my view, what was another of the errors of those years, to which the Pope himself is slowly applying a remedy, first with the Motu Proprio, and next with the restoration of the cross at the center of the altar, Communion received kneeling, and more to come.
On the one hand the document preached renewal, insisting forcibly on it, and generating the birth of an incredible series of experimental Masses in which everything was up for grabs and during which the celebrant became the one who thought up new forms of ritual ever more fantastic, all the way to “rock Masses”, or Masses where women danced around the altar. On the other hand the Document called for the retention of Latin, along with a greater use of the vernacular, and at the same time asked that no innovations should be introduced “unless demanded by a true and discerned benefit to the Church”. This was followed by a warning that the new forms come forth organically, in some way, from the forms already existing in the Liturgy. With respect to music in the Liturgy, the Council affirmed that “the Church recognizes Gregorian chant as the music proper to the Roman Liturgy”. This chant is accorded the “the first place” (among other types of Church music). The document asks in context to hold “in great honor the pipe organ…whose playing is able to add a notable splendor to the ceremonies of the Church”.
In the present time however, in practice, one must concede that Latin has vanished, and that there has not remained a trace of Gregorian chant or of the organ. In perfect consistency with this, the altars of past times have been torn down, together with the altar rails and everything that in the traditional Mass that functioned to underscore the sacral nature of the ceremony and its character as the renewal of the Sacrifice of the Cross. There was nothing positive about this outcome. In confronting certain errors of the past that eminent cardinals and popes acknowledged in the face of the explosion of Protestantism, the Church of the Council of Trent was allowed to experience a rebirth, after truly dark times. Has not the moment arrived, even today, for some small “mea culpa”, some acknowledgment of blame, for a rethinking, at least, of this optimism that is both worldly and utopian? In truth, the optimism that we are able to profess as Christians is truly immense, but it comes from the Resurrection of Christ as an historical event, not from any other source. From His death, on the other hand, we should take our understanding of realism, the knowledge of our sins and of the necessity of converting ourselves and of converting, not stroking, the world.
This essay appeared HERE in Settimo Cielo, the blog of Sandro Magister.
Reproduced by kind permission of Sandro Magister.
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