Vatican Council II: The Great New Approach

A KIND OF MUTINY


It was at that point that Pope John XXIII played a part which reminds one of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. The fact is that he was suddenly overtaken by events, giving the impression that he was no longer capable of governing. According to the reports of Fr. Congar (and others), the Pope "had something simple in mind, a kind of kerygmatic¹ theology of the Faith, with a very detailed adaptation of Canon Law." In the event, this Council, which Pope John XXIII intended to last for two months and be completed by Christmas, continued for four years.


The Council had hardly begun, Fr. Congar tells us in the same interview, when "the bishops became more confident and very quickly, from October 1962, a certain number of bishops had simply decided to reject the doctrinal schemas which had already been prepared."

Carried along by this tidal wave, it is reported that Pope John XXIII said to several cardinals (from whom Fr. Congar got his information): "They didn't understand me." If this is so, it implies that he never regained control of the situation. Archbishop Lefebvre, in one of his first addresses on this subject (1969), referring to events which in many ways resembled a mutiny, said:


THE "SPIRIT OF THE COUNCIL"



THE "MOST FUNDAMENTAL" TEXT

Fr. Congar, while he has no great opinion of the Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) which he regards as a banal document with no other merit than having "contradicted the Syllabus," exalts the merits of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) and regrets that this text did not have a greater impact.

We too admit that this document is of great importance but for reasons very different from those of Fr. Congar.

Passing over his laudatory commentaries on things he approves of, we shall concentrate on his statement that this constitution had "a considerable influence":


ALIGNMENT WITH LUTHERANISM

In other words, this conciliar constitution, which claims to be "dogmatic" and which has set the direction for all the other conciliar texts, which has presided over the liturgical reform, which has had a considerable ecumenical influence, intends to impose - as a dogma - the liquidation of the Tridentine Counter-Reformation. Thus it prescribes alignment with the Protestant Reformation, which the Council of Trent was (we must suppose) mistaken in opposing!

The new "pastoral" approach which the Council wanted to impose dogmatically (Dei Verbum is a "dogmatic constitution") is an invitation to ignore the Council of Trent, to act as if it no longer exists, as if it no longer has any validity. This is the return to the Protestant principle of "sola Scriptura" - Scripture alone is the source of revelation -which explains (and here Fr. Congar is right) the ecumenical strategy of the Council and the total reform of the liturgy, not only of the ritual but of the entire temporal cycle. This explains the pre-eminent place given to the "Liturgy of the Word" and to biblical texts (sola Scriptura), going hand-in-hand with the disappearance of the systematic teaching of religion according to a true Catechism (which is the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which formed the basis of the diocesan catechisms until 30 years ago). This explains the return to the Memorial of the Last Supper, which does not need a true altar but only a simple table, and the de-natured function of the priest, who no longer sacrifices but has become the president of the assembly.


THE ECUMENICAL APPROACH

We are very well aware that the liturgical reform has been following scarcely camouflaged ecumenical objectives. The reformers, working together with well-known Protestants, played on the ambivalence of the new rite and, by means of this subterfuge, toyed with the idea that the reformed missal could be used by both Catholics and Protestants, together or separately.

This is intellectual dishonesty, which has created and maintained ambiguity in the hope of attracting Protestants. There is something in this which recalls Pascal's famous "wager," in the sense that the Catholic invites the non-Catholic to have some experience of Catholic religious practice, by substituting habit for faith. This is why, by the way, certain philosophers consider Pascal a modernist before his time. The "experience" of Catholicism as a source of Faith is very close to modernist immanentism, if not identical with it.

It is permissible to see similarities between Pascal's "wager" and what is called "communio in sacris," which the Council's Decree on Ecumenism, far from excluding, considers positively as something to be "sometimes desirable" as a way of re-establishing Christian unity, a method to be used with " discernment," prudently, according to the judgment of episcopal authority such precautions are more in the nature of a pious hope.

"Communio in sacris" means participation by non-Catholics in the sacred action, i. e., the liturgy, not only in prayer. There is more than a simple analogy between this practice, which is growing more and more, and Pascal's "wager." The latter invites the non-believer, whom he would like to lead to the Faith by means of religious practice, to "wager" on the existence or non-existence of God and then, on the basis of belief in God's existence, to draw the practical consequences for his life. After this, Pascal indicates what he believes to be the "system" already followed by others:
The justified objection to this method is that it has substituted external gestures for the internal act of faith and has given the non-believer license to perform sacred acts in virtue of "experience," whereas these acts are reserved by the Church to those who have the Faith and the necessary purity of heart. Thus it has authorized the non-believer to perform sacrilegious and gravely culpable acts). Applied to Ecumenism, this process consists, neither more nor less, in inviting Protestants and Orthodox to "act as if they were Catholics," in Pascal's terms and to join in (communicatio) the Church's liturgy (in sacris) after having accommodated it in order to make it easier for them to take this step. In other words, the liturgical reformers have lowered the threshold of orthodoxy so that the invited guests should not stumble at the first step.



THE " ANTHROPOLOGICAL " APPROACH

A second current which has determined the reflections and acts of the Council Fathers is the so-called Theological Anthropology or Anthropological Theology, which has transformed theology into sociology. The most authoritative witness to this approach is Pope Paul VI himself. On December 7, 1965, addressing the Council in its final session, he said:
This is a confession of considerable weight: the Church has turned towards man.

Are we to understand that the Church has turned towards man by turning its back on God? Pope Paul VI says no; the hierarchy will certainly say no. But when, 30 years after the end of the Council, we see that the bishops and their clergy have become sociologists and, in fact, no longer teach religion, one can and must wonder if, after all the discussions and statements, this is not the reality of the situation: the Church, in the person of her ministers, has turned towards man by turning away from God.

The "Christian" philanthropy has infiltrated everywhere. It is even found in the Decree on Ecumenism, in the second chapter which deals with the practice of Ecumenism. Here we find a section devoted to "collaboration with our separated brethren," who are invited to join in the crusade "against the afflictions of our times, such as famine and natural disasters, illiteracy and poverty, lack of housing and the unequal distribution of wealth," all objectives within the competence of states and public authorities and not of the Church.


THE "SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE"

A third factor, which is more a mentality than a deliberate approach but which played its part at the Council and goes a long way towards explaining what happened "after the Council," is the spirit of independence - which is at the root of Protestantism.

The first manifestation of the spirit of rebellion was the mutiny of an important segment of the episcopate at the start of the Council Immediately thereafter the modernists took charge of the direction the Council was to take. Thanks to this initial revolt against authority, the bishops became infatuated with independence and "freedom." It was at this time that one impertinent individual, having said that after Vatican I, the Church had had some great Popes, like Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI and Pius XII, dared to add that, with the passage of time, the Roman Curia had become a perfectly effective...omnipotent...instrument of government and study...in other words, it had become tyrannical.

During the Council, Pope Paul VI seemed to share this blind opposition to supreme power. In the interview already mentioned, Fr. Congar gives this testimony:
Here we must recall the episode of the Nota Praevia (Preliminary Explanatory Note) which was imposed by Pope Paul VI to make it clear in the traditional sense the term "collegiality" was to be understood. The very existence of this Nota Praevia (see [below]), quite independently of what it contains, is one proof among many of the lack of intellectual rigor on the part of the Council's artisans. The most worrying thing, however, is the incoherent position of the Pope vis-a-vis the Council, as underlined by Fr. Congar. This is the attitude of a Head who has no awareness of his authority and who dares not intervene. At all events, he does not intervene very much, nor does he do so in a precise manner. We find an incoherent theological attitude here. On the one hand, from time to time, he is obliged to remind the fathers that he has the primacy, while on the other hand it seems that, with his "discreet" interventions, he is trying to win acceptance as one Council father among others (which he is not).

THE MODERNIST TYRANNY

The sequel is in line with this desire for emancipation on the part of the bishops. They demand that the Roman Curia be "internationalized": it is granted. They demand the reform of the Curia and of Church government: the reform was initiated on August 15, 1967, with the constitution Regimini Ecclesiae Universae, which satisfies those who were complaining of the "tyranny" of Rome. The Holy Office, whose essential task was to guard the integrity of the doctrine of Faith - which was why it was feared by the modernists - is liquidated to make room for a kind of Theologians' Academy without any coercive powers. The case of Hans Küng amply demonstrated this. The Consistory, a disciplinary congregation (a kind of council of the Episcopal Order), was also liquidated and replaced by a Congregation for Bishops without coercive powers. Moreover, all the congregations lose their autonomy and are now dependent on the Secretariat of State, which thus becomes the central organ of Church government, whereas the pope is reduced to a figurehead, like the sovereign of a modern state where the king reigns but does not govern. From 1967 on, a reign of inverse tyranny begins in the Church. The tyranny of the modernists, who have taken over all controls.


ATTEMPTS TO PROTESTANTIZE THE CHURCH

Once the boundaries were thrown down and the Roman guardianship shaken, the bishops, in their turn, saw their diocesan clergy adopting the same attitude towards them. Then the faithful did the same towards their parish clergy, thanks to the bad example set by those above them. We must even say that it was the clergy themselves who pushed the faithful to act in this way.

Thinking that they were doing well to adulate the laity, who were now invited to become “adult Christians,” bishops and clergy sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. In turn, the faithful made themselves independent. Who cannot see the enormous difference between “adult Christians” and Christian adults? In the wake of the Council, Christians who foolishly had been taught that henceforth they were “adults” grasped that this implied that they were to reject all tutelage, doctrinal and disciplinary, on the part of their pastors. That is how the mentality of the Protestant “freedom of conscience” has been insinuated into people’s minds, without the need -as Luther did long ago, at Wittenberg - to nail a series of theses to the Church doors, declaring the break with Rome. Luther's Protestantism was doctrinal; that of the modernists, for 30 years, has been practical. It is a Protestantism of deeds, it is concrete, but the result is the same. Why should we be surprised at the attempts to rehabilitate Luther? And what is the purpose of this rehabilitation? Perhaps to facilitate the return of Lutherans to the Catholic Church? ...Let's be serious for once!

And why should we be amazed at the demands made in the petition circulated last year in Germany by the group calling itself "We are Church”? The one thing follows directly from the other!

Insofar as these faithful - though it must be questioned whether they belong to the Church - regard themselves as liberated from hierarchical tutelage, and insofar as their thinking is unconsciously influenced by the democratic principles of modern society, they are only imitating the kind of false demands made by trade-unions in the economic and social sphere. To show them that they are in error, one would have to go right up to the top of the ladder of ideas and there one would arrive at the testimony of Fr. Congar:
In the world of ideas, there are some things as dangerous as grenades; when they are man-handled, they explode and the damage sometimes far exceeds all prediction.


BUT IT’S YESTERDAY’S POPES WHO ARE TO BLAME

Would the hierarchy have the courage, 30 years after Vatican II, to draw up the balance-sheet? Will it still say that, as some people have said, one has to distinguish between the Council and what came after it?

On this matter, Fr. Congar gave an astonishing answer to the readers of La Croix in 1976: those responsible for the post-conciliar confusion, he suggested, were Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Pius X and Pius XII, whose qualities as a very great pope he is quick to acknowledge, only to go on to attack him in what follows:
Clearly, then, the distant origin of the post-conciliar disorder and confusion must be sought in the narrow mentality of the popes of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Pius XII.


CONCLUSIONS

It will be remembered that Fr. Congar was influential at the Council as a theologian, as one of its "experts." This is widely known. He himself was not slow to mention the fact and the journalists who interviewed him were happy to underline it, in order to give importance and authority to his utterances. What he said on the approach adopted by the Council, which is presented as a huge enterprise with a pastoral aim, and that had broken with the Counter-Reformation, cannot be neglected. The fact is that his observations on the achievement of Vatican II have not been rectified by the French episcopate nor by Rome. Not only has Fr. Congar not been disavowed, he was conferred with the cardinalitial dignity. This has given to his views, declarations, writings and publications, the highest guarantee he could have hoped for. Elevating him to the cardinalate, Pope John Paul II and the cardinals of the Curia have ratified Congar's views and commentaries on the Council's whole approach, giving them an official certificate of authority. From the simple religious he was in 1960, Cardinal Congar has thus become the Council's authorized interpreter, in the name of the hierarchy.

Having taken note of this, it will be easy to draw the following consequences - indeed, they are dazzlingly self-evident:

1. In pursuing a "pastoral" aim which breaks with the Counter-Reformation, the artisans of Vatican II have first of all put themselves out of range of the assistance of the Holy Ghost. It follows from this that Vatican II is merely a human work, a work of Churchmen. Its declarations must, therefore, be evaluated by reference to traditional doctrine.

2. Everything in the Council texts (constitutions, decrees, declarations) which calls for the faith and assent of the faithful would not be there had there not been 20 previous, authentic, infallible and irreformable councils. In other words, the Faith and adherence of the faithful has for its object, beyond Vatican II, all the doctrine formulated previously and which is found scattered here and there, in fragmentary allusions, in the Council texts. This means that the Council, as a point of reference, is not only incomplete and therefore superfluous, but it is furthermore harmful insofar as it is contaminated by the modernist vein, which is a spiritual poison.

Here it is appropriate to recall that the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, which deals with Divine Revelation and replaced the original schema entitled De Fontibus Revelationis, is considered to be the most important document since it gave the direction for the other conciliar texts. It directed the liturgical reform and, by refusing to ratify the theory of the two sources of revelation (Scripture and Tradition), it permitted - as they claim - a rapprochement with Protestants and exercised a considerable ecumenical influence…This is the constitution which, according to Fr. Congar, has put an end to the Counter- Reformation.

3. In spite of appearances, therefore, Vatican II is a pseudo-council. From a totally different point of view, one could say that it was useful in the life and health of the Church in the way that, in the field of medicine, an abscess can be regarded as useful since it concentrates and localizes the organism's infection. Sooner or later, the "conciliar" men, identified with the modernists, will be eliminated from the Church.

No true progress, no ecclesial development, can be accomplished outside of Tradition, let alone where it is rejected. Yet that is what the artisans of Vatican II wanted and that is what they did. In this matter, Cardinal Congar has given us a formal, irrefutable testimony.

(Translated by Graham Harrison from Courrier de Rome, May 1998, for the Society of Saint Pius X's quarterly review in Ireland, St.John's Bulletin.)






A query has been made as to what is the theological qualification to be attached to the teaching put forward in the schema The Church, on which a vote is to be taken.

The doctrinal commission has replied to this query in appraising the modi proposed to the third chapter of the schema The Church:
On this occasion, the doctrinal commission referred to its Declaration of Mar. 6, 1964, which we reproduce here:

PRELIMINARY EXPLANATORY NOTE

The commission has decided to preface its assessment of the modi with the following general observations.

1. The word College is not taken in the strictly juridical sense, that is, as a group of equals who transfer their powers to their chairman, but as a permanent body whose form and authority is to be ascertained from revelation. For this reason it is explicitly said about the twelve apostles in the reply to modus 12 that Our Lord constituted them “as a college or permanent group” (cf. modus 53,c). In the same way the words “Order” or “Body” are used at other times for the college of bishops. The parallel between Peter and the apostles on the one hand, and the Pope and the bishops on the other, does not imply the transmission of the extraordinary power of the apostles to their successors, nor obviously does it imply equality between the head and members of the college, but only a proportion between the two relationships: Peter – apostles and popes – bishops. And therefore the commission decided to write in Art 2 not “in the same manner” (eadem ratione) but “in like manner” (pari ratione).

2. A man becomes a member of the college through episcopal consecration and hierarchical communion with the head of the college and its members (cf. art.22. end of §1).

It is the unmistakable teaching of tradition, including liturgical tradition, that an ontological share in the sacred functions is given by consecration. The word function is deliberately used in preference to powers which can have a sense of powers ordered to action. A canonical or juridical determination through hierarchical authority is required for such power ordered to action. A determination of this kind can come about through appointment to a particular office or the assignment of subjects, and is conferred according to norms approved by the supreme authority. The need for a further norm follows from the nature of the case, because it is a question of functions to be discharged by more than one subject who work together in the hierarchy of functions intended by Christ. “Communion” of this kind was in fact a feature abiding in the varying circumstances of the life of the Church through the ages, before it was endorsed and codified by law.

For this reason it is expressly stated that hierarchical communion with the head and members is required. The idea of communion was highly valued in the early Church, and indeed it is today, especially in the East. It is not to be understood as some vague sort of goodwill, but as something organic which calls for a juridical structure as well as being enkindled by charity. The commission, therefore, agreed, almost unanimously, on the wording “in hierarchical communion” (cf. modus 40 and the statements about canonical mission in art.24).

The documents of recent popes dealing with episcopal jurisdiction are to be interpreted as referring to this necessary determination of powers.

3. There is no such thing as the college without its head: it is “The subject of supreme and entire power over the whole Church.” This much must be acknowledge lest the fullness of the pope’s power be jeopardized. The idea of college necessarily and at all times involves a head and in the college the head preserves intact his function as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the universal Church. In other words, it is not a distinction between the Roman Pontiff and the bishops taken together, but the Roman Pontiff by himself and the Roman Pontiff along with the bishops. The pope alone, in fact, being head of the college, is qualified to perform certain actions in which the bishops have no competence whatsoever, for example, the convocation and direction of the college, approval of the norms of its activity, and so (cf. Modus 18). It is for the pope, to whom the care of the whole flock of Christ has been entrusted, to decide the best manner of implementing this care, either personal or collegiate, in order to meet the changing needs of the Church in the course of time. The Roam Pontiff undertakes the regulation, encouragement, and approval of the exercise of collegiality as he sees fit.


4. The pope, as supreme pastor of the Church, may exercise his power at any time, as he sees fit, by reason of the demands of his office. But as the Church’s tradition attests, the college, although it is always in existence, is not for that reason continually engaged in strictly collegiate activity. In other words, it is not always “in full activity” (in acta pleno); in fact it is only occasionally that it engages in strictly collegiate activity and that only with the consent of the head (nonnisi consentiente capite). The phrase “with the consent of the head” is used in order to exclude the impresssion of dependence on something external; but the word “consent” entails communion between head and members and calls for this action which is exclusive to the head. The point is expressly stated in art. 22, §2 and it is explained at the end of the same article. The negative formulation “only with” (nonnisi) covers all cases: consequently it is evident that the norms approved by the supreme authority must always be observed (cf. modus 84).

Clearly it is the connection of bishops with their head that is in question throughout and not the activity of bishops independently of the pope. In a case like that, in default of the pope’s action, the bishops cannot act as a college, for this is obvious from the idea of “college” itself. This hierarchical communion of all bishops with the pope is unmistakably hallowed by tradition.