Later we are told that the texts are not “legal documents or unalterable Holy Writ, once-for-all and perpetually binding.” Well no, none of those things. In practical, pastoral and prudential matters, the Council’s provisions are not perpetually binding any more than Lateran IV’s instruction to Jews to wear a badge or the Council of Vienne’s mandating of the burning of homosexuals. As was pointed out by a learned friend of mine, nobody today would want to invoke the spirit of Vienne.
Nevertheless, if we are talking about the second Vatican Council, it is the texts that matter. Subsequent legislation, implementation, or interpretation is the subject of legitimate debate among canonists, theologians, sociologists or editorial writers of magazines – even bloggers if one might be so bold.
The Tablet is not too keen on some of the documents. Oddly, it singles out Inter Mirifica for scorn, describing it as “embarrassingly poor.” I find that surprising. The decree says in n.13:
All the children of the Church should join, without delay and with the greatest effort in a common work to make effective use of the media of social communication in various apostolic endeavours, as circumstances and conditions demand. They should anticipate harmful developments, especially in regions where more urgent efforts to advance morality and religion are needed.That seems to me quite prescient for a document issued in 1962 when the popular use of the internet was still some years away. For my money, Gaudium et Spes would be up there in the embarrassing stakes but that is probably more because of its execrable Latin (De Urgentioribus Quibusdam Problemationibus is actually the heading of the Pars Secunda.)
The Tablet dives into the question of the hermeneutic of continuity, seeing the Holy Father’s 2005 address as more nuanced than the “conservative interpretation” (who can they mean?) They speak as though Pope Benedict thought that some parts of Vatican II had more continuity and others more reform. It is impossible to read the Holy Father’s address honestly in such terms. He was referring to the Council as a whole and proposing that all of it should be understood in terms of a hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.
He said that the hermeneutic of rupture caused confusion, yet the Tablet insists that some parts of the Council have no continuity whatsoever – particularly Nostra Aetate which “flatly contradicts Pope Pius IX’s encyclical known as the Syllabus of Errors.” The writer probably meant the encyclical Quanta Cura (the Syllabus of Errors was not an encyclical but a curial document issued the same day) but we can let that pass. The Tablet entirely ignores the lively debate among theologians over whether Nostra Aetate was indeed a contradiction of Quanta Cura. In our own country, the distinguished philosopher, Professor Tom Pink of Kings College has exchanged papers in response to Fr Ronheimer on this question.
This failure to address a significant debate of our own time on precisely the subject of continuity and rupture on which the Tablet is lecturing its readers does lead one to wonder how much they are interested in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Council itself and whether the real concern is simply to continue to propose an understanding of the Church which has plagued the journal since soixante huit and Humanae Vitae. They even get the slogans wrong: aggiornamento means "bringing up to date" not "opening to the world." (In fact, when Blessed Pope John XXIII announced the council in 1959, his celebrated use of the word aggiornamento referred to updating the code of canon law.)
The editorial’s peroration reads as follows:
If a return to the texts leads the Church to rediscover that vision and resolve to make it come alive at last, a new and exciting chapter may be about to be written. The Church will be set in motion again. But the forces of anti-conciliar reaction have not yet been defeated. They did not like the council then and they do not like it now, and they will do everything they can to frustrate it.In fact, a return to the texts of the Council will reveal to many younger people that the Council was not what the Tablet and others have pretended. It is full of sober orthodox teaching entirely in continuity with the tradition of the Church which has over the years been obscured by the mythical construction of a non-existent version of Vatican II.
In response to a new generation discovering what the Council actually taught, the Tablet may indeed join the SSPX in rejecting some of the texts. Pope Benedict XVI insists on them – but only if understood in terms of reform and renewal in continuity with the one subject-Church. As he said, the Fathers of the Council had no mandate to construct a new constitution for the Church, nor could they have, since the essential constitution of the Church comes from the Lord and was given to us so that we might attain eternal life. The Tablet has no such mandate either.
UPDATE
See also:
Fr Z: The Tablet’s latest cowardly editorial
Protect the Pope: The Tablet misrepresents ‘the hermeneutic of continuity’ to make case for hermeneutic of rupture
Offerimus tibi Domine: Hermeneutic of continuity
11 comments:
A fine response, Father. Have you considered sending it to the Tablet for publication?
No point, Father, it will get more readers here ;-)
I find it odd that the Tabletista type fails to note that the numerous footnotes to the conciliar documents (in my English version) refer mainly to: Sacred Scripture and former Councils. The latter most frequently quoted, in my straw poll, are Trent and V1. So much for rupture!
Father, I have no doubt you will be aware of Bishop Michael Smith, of Meath and his article in The Irish Times of September 14, 2010: "RITE AND REASON: Hans Küng is less qualified than most to criticise the pope".
You will recall that in it Bishop Michael spoke of Dr Hans Küng writing his lamentable Open Letter to His Holiness with "an infallibility no pope would claim", despite and especially since it "contained factual errors, eg that Pope Benedict had taken bishops of the traditionalist Pius X Society back into the church without precondition."
Of course Hans Küng is not so much an alternative Pope as an alternative God to the Tabletistas. If you believe, like me, that your dear readers deserve the immunisation an exposure to Bishop Michael's thoughts on the matter would bring, they can read the article at:
http://www.irishsalem.com/international-controversies/The%20Vatican/kung-invokes-spirit-14sep10.php
A wee apology: such was and is Küng's arrogance that the Open Letter was, of course, to the Church, and not to His Holiness.
"... the Tablet may indeed join the SSPX..."
There's something unexpectedly poetic about that sentence fragment!
I know that I am in danger of boring people, but the way we counteract the overtly liberal Catholics/Tabletistas at St Marys is by actually engaging with them and speaking to them.
A couple of us are reasonably well versed in Vatican II and when people say something which is incorrect we actually speak to them and tell them what Vatican II actually states.
Some do not listen, some get angry, some do listen, and some say "why were we not told this before?"
One woman stated that "Confession became an optional extra at Vatican II" but by actually engaging with them some of the damage can be reversed.
We also engage the others by empowering them to be authentic Catholics once again. For instance, one woman would not go to the priest for holy water. She said that "that Catholics and priests in this country do not really believe in these things" (her words not mine). We soon got her back on track and in the end not only did she get her holy water but she then places an information sheet on the notice board. Somebody else we spoke to earlier then went and photocopied more copies for people.
We also empowered another woman to kneel for communion (she wanted to but knew others in the congregation were anti-kneeling).
It really is 'one brick at a time' but it works.
There are too many traditionalists/orthodox Catholics moaning, and now they need to actually start getting their hands dirty on the ground and start to bring people back to authentic Catholicism.
Father, Thank you for very much for such a profound article refuting totally a shameful editorial
Well the PP Emeritus of our parish must be a reader of the Tablet, as his homily last Sunday was eerily similar (maybe he gets an advance copy?). He alternates Sundays with our current PP and it is getting harder and harder for me to sit through his diatribes - er, homilies.
People have walked out during them in the past, but so far I have resisted the urge. The Mass is more important than the homilist. But leaving the church seething every other Sunday is probably not doing much for my spiritual advancement.
I wrote a (privately circulated) analysis of this very same thing last week, that a friend has asked me to repost here :
————
The “Hermeneutic of Reform”
This “Hermeneutic of Reform” looks like it’s developing into a major defensive strategy of the modernists against the Pope’s declarations that the doctrines of Vatican II must be read in the light of the Catholic Tradition…
1) first, they redefine the Pope’s comments regarding the “hermeneutic of continuity” and the “hermeneutic of rupture” so as to make it appear that the Pope was blaming the traditionalists, conservatives, and other orthodox Catholics for the “rupture” they have caused by not going along with the reformers, thereby implicitly redefining “continuity” to mean “reform”
2) second, objections against the reforms, abuses and all, are redefined as a “rhetoric of rupture”, by cherry-picking various quotes from this or that source
3) the entirety of the opposition to the excesses of the reformers and modernists is then dumped on the shoulders of Monseigneur Lefebvre and the SSPX, whose positions are simultaneously exaggerated, in order to push through the rhetoric that any and all opposition to these modernist reforms can only be “lefebvrist”, extremist, fundamentalist, and sedevacantist (in other words, “no true Catholic” could possibly ever oppose these reformists’ ongoing liturgical and doctrinal experiments
4) fourth, the disagreements and misunderstandings and miscommunications between the SSPX and the Holy See are emphasised in such a manner as to provide the impression that our current Pope is actively hostile towards the Society — and by extension, towards any rejection of reformism, given that the Society has been set up as the paragon of all forms of liturgical, doctrinal, and ecclesial “reform-skepticism”
5) finally, once this rather forced rhetorical structure has been set in place and amplified by reference to the Pope’s definitional statements seeking to clarify the hermeneutic of continuity as a means of reform rather than rupture, by calling it a hermeneutic of reform, they then suggest that the very hermeneutic of continuity that the Pope has requested of ALL Catholics can therefore be understood as being its direct opposite, that is to say continuity means paralysis, therefore continuity is antithetical to reform, therefore the Pope’s clarification that reform conditioned by continuity is the nature of the work of the Council is directly opposed and denied, so that they can then feel completely justified in continuing to reject any and all opposition to their continuing spirit of reform, as if reform itself could now be viewed as somehow traditional, and opposition to reform as contrary to tradition
And again, never mind that the Pope has so clearly stated that Vatican II must be interpreted in the light of Tradition —- no, instead, heck, instead let’s all write texts purporting that the exact opposite of this request is what the Pope has been teaching !!!!
———-
Just as some supplementary information, this current Tabletista campaign appears (from evidence I’ve seen) to be headquartered at the modernist liberal camp of the Diocese of Portsmouth. Bishop Egan surely has his work cut out for him !!!
very good comment Father Tim ! Bravo.
This time, it seems the Tablet has managed to confuse itself as well.
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