Nope; I haven't
abandoned this blog… these last few weeks have seen me swimming in the deep end of family history: old photographs, letters, documents and more. I'm learning
more about people I knew, or knew about, long ago… whom I'm also part of, and
vice-versa. Where it's Germans, I have fun learning and translating. And where
it's American/Commonwealth, I find I've picked up some of the fascinating work
my mother started on before her strokes, and which has lain idle and waiting
nearly eight years… to a couple centuries. Cool!
Calvinist nurse-friend Senhora gave
me an opportunity to come up for air this afternoon, with a link to a
conservative article about the seemingly "good intentions" of the
Second Vatican Council, versus the lousy fruit that came up in its wake:
From: N.
Fermeira [mailto:Senhora@Yabbadoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 10:52 AM
To: Aging Child <AGeneChilde@YouWho.com>
Subject: Interested in your reaction to this article (not an anti-Catholic one)
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 10:52 AM
To: Aging Child <AGeneChilde@YouWho.com>
Subject: Interested in your reaction to this article (not an anti-Catholic one)
From: Aging
Child [mailto:AGeneChilde@YouWho.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 12:06 PM
To: Senhora@Yabbadoo.com
Subject: RE: Mater et Magistra
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 12:06 PM
To: Senhora@Yabbadoo.com
Subject: RE: Mater et Magistra
Will do,
ma'am – I've got it up onscreen right now, and will start on in. Anti-Catholic
I can handle… there's little that's as challenging as one of Jack Chick's
intractable tracts, or marching Orangemen. More this afternoon; cheers!
(I'm not going to
reproduce the article here; have a look yourself; I'll wait. While reading the
article, I swung over to Catholic Answers for a nonsecular look at the
Council and its impact. There I found a piece written by keen authority and
writer Marcellino d'Ambrosio, "The Unfinished Business of Vatican II". I quoted it just a bit (and should have attributed it as well); it helped knowledgeably
counterbalance what outside-looking-in insisted on seeing.)
From: Aging
Child [mailto:AGeneChilde@YouWho.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 2:03 PM
To: Senhora@Yabbadoo.com
Subject: RE: Mater Ecclesia
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 2:03 PM
To: Senhora@Yabbadoo.com
Subject: RE: Mater Ecclesia
Okay…
At first
pass – still reading the article/editorial…
The writer's
dead-on, in that quite a number of stupid and just-plain wrong things
cropped up in the Church in the wake of Vatican II; and he does seem to be
calling for a return to how the Church had done things for generations and
centuries. But he's dead wrong in saying (or at least implying and presenting)
that these things were brought about because of the Council.
His thrust
is the tack/slant of a lot of Western secular journalism in looking at the
postconciliar Catholic Church: an inerrant "post hoc, ergo propter
hoc" about visible/outward changes in the Church from the late 1960s on
out: these changes came after the Council, therefore they're the Council's fault
and doing. The writer – Pulitzer-Prize winner that he is – does not quote even
one Conciliar document to back that up, and by tone and context simply cites
the vague "spirit of Vatican II" as cause and fulcrum and
mandate for those changes.
Every major Council
has been followed by decades of reflection and debate – e.g., the Council of
Trent (1546–64) mandated the creation of the Church's first seminary system…
but it took a century and a half before that vision was made a reality. And
Councils are also followed by immediate misunderstanding (both inside and
outside of the Church), knee-jerk reflexive, too-soon leaps out of the gate,
and missteps and fits and starts.
So it's
certainly been the same with Vatican II!
The Council
(e.g., in "Sacrosanctum Concilium") did not mandate building
churches more like Frank Lloyd Wright works; nor moving the tabernacle; nor
replacing crucified Christ with resurrected/risen Christ. It did call
for greater participation by the laity, and for bringing the Mass more directly
to them, which included the liturgical shift from Latin to the vernacular. But
Latin was never dropped, never banned – and absolutely retains a place of
prominence in the Church in both liturgy and administration.
Nor was the
Council convened for "altering the liturgy and dispensing with centuries
of tradition to appease a world society"; nor was it "the impetus
behind the liberalization of the Catholic Church". However… assumptions
made about the Council, and serious misinterpretations of its objectives
and directives, were used as impetus (i.e., excuse/rationale) for some
agenda-driven in-ecclesiam people to make drastic changes that were not called
for, and were profoundly counter to the Church and Council's mission, means,
and method. So, for just one example, nuns shucked their habits in favor of
pants suits and even short skirts. (Today, the nuns' orders that are seeing the
greatest number of new – and young – members are those with traditional,
floor-length habits. The liberalized ones are dying out.)
In fact, the
Council was called in response to a serious pastoral crisis, not a dogmatic
one: this was on the eve, and right in the midst, of great cultural shifts and
revolutions – but it wasn't called to kowtow to or leap on board with those
movements. In a nutshell, the goal of the Council was to equip the Church to
effectively re-evangelize the world through a compelling proclamation of Christ
in a language that the world could understand (hence the vernacular).
The Council
also sought to revitalize Christians by reconnecting them with the sources of
faith and life: the Bible, the liturgy, and the Fathers of the Church. And a
more accurate self-understanding on the part of the Church was needed, so that
clergy and laity could more clearly understand their own roles in fulfilling
the mission of evangelization that Jesus had entrusted to the Church.
The
article's writer connects and contrasts shifts in society and culture away from
religion and religion-derived values, with the Council – although, he more
realistically concedes, "it would be unwise to ascribe a cause-and-effect
relationship between Mass attendance and Vatican II".
Correct! Those shifts were already in motion when the Council Fathers first sat
down together in 1962, and are the milieu and context which all of Christendom
engages, in which it lives today – not a response to the Council.
He's also
dead-wrong in saying the Council was convoked to "appease a
modernizing world, not surrender to it". Huh? In essence and
practice, appeasement is surrender; and the Church does neither. It
reaches out. And it doesn't change its mission: it's never wavered on any key
doctrine: marriage, life (e.g., abortion), mission.
The nearest
I've seen to "appeasement" in the Church is at the local level: 1990s
lectionaries and hymnbooks with "inclusive language", where God is no
longer "he", for instance; churches with no visible tabernacle, no
visible suffering Christ. These aren't Rome's doings; they're diocesan, and
regional – and have in fact been thrust back out again, such as with updates to
the Mass late in 2011.
In all, our
author is fairly right-on in describing the symptoms – but not in their cause,
nor what's incubated the symptoms. He cites two responses the Church can make:
return to tradition… which, in fact, the Church never left. And what it's been
doing of late is that very return to tradition: excising some of local,
modernist accretions. (But there, he skirts and skates close to the
schismatics, such as the Society of St. Pius the Tenth, who have been more
Catholic and more holy than the Pope since 1958.)
The other
response would be, stupidly, for the Church to withdraw from the world and wash
its hands, while also folding them in prayer. Yet Jesus (and His apostles and
saints) walked right into the world's problems and issues, head on, and He
poured out all His blood for them; that's the only approach the Church can
give. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church (Tertullian). Mother
Teresa lived that… her sisters' churches don't even have pews, let alone plush
kneelers…
I've urged it before: we don't need a faith that
merely affirms us – that would be the Unitarians down the road, or the United
Church of Canada. Our faith must challenge us… again, following in
Jesus' footsteps: "You've heard it said that… But I say that…"
shows up six times in Matthew 5 alone. And
that is the Church.
Regards,
Gene
Although you
Have not seen Him, you love Him; even though you do not see Him now, yet
believe in Him, you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, as you
attain the goal of your faith. — 1 Peter 1:8-9
And I heard back fairly quickly… considering that Senhora N. Fermeira
and I both lead busy lives.
From: N. Fermeira
[mailto:Senhora@Yabbadoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 4:52 PM
To: Aging Child <AGeneChilde@YouWho.com>
Subject: Re: Mater Ecclesia
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 4:52 PM
To: Aging Child <AGeneChilde@YouWho.com>
Subject: Re: Mater Ecclesia
I didn't
take it that the author was saying the Council caused the undesirable
consequences -- more that the cultural climate of the times resulted in
a warping of the laudable goals of the Council. I think the same happened
in Protestantism. Of course I have no expertise on Catholic history so can't --
nor do I wish to -- dispute your assertions based on your own familiarity with
that history.
I was
more taken with his observation that traditionalist may ultimately be the only
Catholics (and Protestants too!) left upholding the Christian faith. And it was
interesting that some are advocating a withdrawal to monastic communities by
the true believers.
Anyway,
thanks for the thorough analysis. :)
The
fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience:
you get the medieval picturesqueness of one, with the modern conveniences of
the other.
Saki
(Hector Hugh Munro)
I'd braced myself for a loose step… and it wasn't there at all;
huh.
From: Aging Child [mailto:AGeneChilde@YouWho.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 5:37 PM
To: Senhora@Yabbadoo.com
Subject: RE: Ecclesial Mater
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 5:37 PM
To: Senhora@Yabbadoo.com
Subject: RE: Ecclesial Mater
Most welcome, N! I always fret that
when I weigh in long-distance, the recipient will growl and gnash… so thank you
for letting me know how the article came across to you. And I appreciate your
take; that actually helps me along!
(Just now heard on a streamed
program, quoting Fulton Sheen: "It's impossible to lose your footing on
your knees.")
That darned cultural climate! And
der Heilige Geist (Holy Ghost/Spirit) is discarded in favor the zeitgeist…
brother! I think that the majority of the folks who sought/worked to
"update" the Catholic Church did so out of naïveté and good
intentions (paving the road to…), rather than manipulativeness and an agenda
even to overturn: they were good-hearted, but clueless.
The same, I think also, probably applies to the
protestant world… but if I assert that really strongly, I'd be doing it outside
of my own reckoning. My sense, though, is that when the Seventh Lambeth
Conference in 1930, in Resolution 15, green-lit contraception, the first big appeasement domino fell… and with
"I'm OK, You're OK", four decades later, just about all of the
protestant shepherds leapt into the life-is-cheap pool… instead of pulling the
sheep out of it.
So… yah; unless Jesus was really a
married gay abortion doctor who drove a brand-new Lamborghini, it's only a
(re)turn to the tradition that will save Christendom, both outside of and
within the walls of the Vatican… and at the soup kitchen. Anything less… well,
one scriptural passage that's always troubled me is Matthew 7:21-23:
Not everyone who says to Me, "Lord, Lord," will enter
the kingdom of Heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in
Heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, "Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy
in Your name? Didn't we drive out demons in Your name? Didn't we do mighty
deeds in Your name?" Then I will declare to them solemnly, "I never
knew you."
You know I'm all for
monastic/professed communities! But the Church (on either side of the Tiber)
simply can't respond to the present day like the proverbial ostrich, and
retreat so far back into the cloister that that's all that's left of it. His
church will always have to go out to the people (Jesus spent a lot of
time in Samaria!) – it's good for the humility of the shepherds, and brings
hope to where it's needed most.
Okay; now, sing along with me:
"Brighten the corner where you aaaare…"
Regards,
Gene
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