Vatican III ?

(Source: Inter Minores, April 2013)

   “Fr Hans Küng said it would be helpful to call 

   a third Vatican Council to deal with these 

   and other issues” (Southern Cross 11/3/2009)

The years during and after the 2^nd Vatican Council I thought was a great time to be alive.  The Church was constantly in the news and the progress of the Council was posted in banner headlines in the media and even on the London underground tube stations.  Besides, the Mass was now in English as opposed to Latin – which was my worst subject at school.  Now I knew what was going on.

SWINGING LONDON:

After the Council, I was living in London, and belonged to Corpus Christi parish in Brixton, South London, then run by the doughty Irish priest, Fr Bailey.  I was inspired to work for the introduction of a parish council, recommended by Vatican II.  I managed to persuade Fr Bailey to initiate the P.P.C. just before going to the Franciscan novitiate in Surrey.  Unfortunately, the first parish council got off to a bad start: the main issue was the wearing of “hot pants” in Church, as this was the “swinging 60’s” in London!

DARKNESS:

However, in spite of all our elation in Brixton, there were dark and unfortunate things going on as well.  I visited a number of seminaries at the time, before joining the Franciscans, and found students pitted against seminary staff in tense stand-offs.  One seminary saw the students rise up and dump the statue of the Sacred Heart in the local duck pond!  Priests were leaving the Church in droves (including my two cousins, and the brother of my best friend in Brixton).  Priests were tearing up rosaries in pulpits and saying that novenas etc were now banned.

Then there was the smashing of altars, altar rails and statues in English churches, and calls for more radical changes in the Church.  The forthright Archbishop Murphy of Cardiff was reported as saying:  “The attitude of the contestateur is somewhat similar to that of those who are always willing to accept a church that is yet to be, or a church that once was, but never the church that is now.  They let the grace of the now slip through their fingers for the sake of a grace that is to be.  Whereas, if there is one thing certain in the spiritual life, it is that we merit future grace only according to the use we make of the present.  Fountains of living water are before them now, but they prefer to nurse their thirst until some ideal drink is presented to them, and in doing so, perish on the way to it”.

Large numbers of people were leaving the Church.  The “swinging 60’s” saw an explosion of permissiveness and abortions.  The Socialist Home Affairs minister, Roy Jenkins, perplexed believers by preaching that “the permissive society was the civilised society”.  It was at this time that the disturbing Death of God “theology” reared its ugly head.

When the windows of the Vatican were opened at Vatican II to let in a bit of fresh air, lurking outside was fully blown socialism, both the Fabian evolutionary brand and the revolutionary kind, itching to fly in the open windows!  To some extent they did succeed.

I often wonder if the rejection of ecclesiastical Latin in the Church after Vatican II was due to the dumbing down effect of socialist education in Catholic countries which saw it as too difficult.  But Muslim parents in South Africa think nothing of teaching their kids the much more difficult “ecclesiastical” Arabic, often whilst working in their shops at the same time.  Muslims are not into socialism.

In through the open Vatican windows other ideas also flew  - e.g. John Osbourne’s laudatory play on Martin Luther.  It was actually performed by Roman seminarians who looked forward to “the dismantling of capitalist society” as well as “to the dismantling of the hierarchical Church”. (AD2000 13(2000)7.)

In 1972, during my English seminary days at Morning Prayer for the Feast of the Chair of Peter, Luther’s mighty Reformation hymn: Ein Feste Burg was intoned loudly by the seminarist organist!

LIBERAL LIBRARIANS:

The library college I studied at earlier at the University at Aberystwyth, Wales, reflected this permissiveness. Revolution was in the air, but this was quickly tamed by compulsory, but unscheduled, lectures on D.H. Lawrence and sex.  This author was infamous for the novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.  Our pigeon holes at College were bombarded with explicit pornographic adverts and catalogues, and we were sent unsolicited copies of “One Dimensional Man” by Herbert Marcuse, a radical Marxist of the Frankfort school “who favoured polymorphous perversion”. (1) His book has been called “one of the most subversive books ever”.

Sex is the great people-tamer, and so all thoughts of radicalism quickly died down in favour of deepening inter-personal relationships.  Except for one revolt against a new law that male students had to be out of female dormitories by midnight!  The authorities capitulated and reversed their decision.  I, for my part, was asked to leave Tanybwylch Halls of Residence, and no reason was given.  I suspected my refusal to attend D.H. Lawrence lectures had something to do with it.  But I found alternative digs with a good Christian family. I was to see a lot of examples of this intolerance of dissenting viewpoints from those who advocated discussion, dialogue and openness.  Label all opposition as “right wing” and then ignore it!  But there can be no synthesis without antithesis.  “Liberals advocate freedom of speech for everyone .... who agrees with them”, rather like Voltaire who boasted disingenuously: “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!”

 A bus load of students of various denominations, but predominantly Catholic, used to leave the Halls every Sunday for churches in Aberystwyth.  In a few weeks I was shocked to find that all had dropped out and the bus was cancelled.  As I walked the shortcut along the beach to Sunday Mass by myself, I had plenty of time to think on the fickleness of human nature!  My best friend was a Muslim Hausa from Northern Nigeria who seemed shell shocked by the permissiveness.  However, not all librarians were permissive liberals.  I heard of some Christians who took early retirement rather than take the once respectable ”Sun” newspaper, now owned by the “Dirty Digger”, as he was called, Rupert Murdoch, who turned it into a semi-pornographic tabloid.

ANOMIE:

When I joined the Franciscan novitiate in Chilworth, Surrey, I had the leisure to try to make sense of all this anomie in Church and society.  Gaudium et Spes, the Vatican document on the Church in the modern world, was a godsend and I devoured it:  “a change of attitudes and structures frequently calls accepted values into question .... great numbers are falling away from the practice of religion .... all of which is very disturbing to many people”.   (G.S.7)

Note that the Vatican Council did not lead to a massive fall away from the Church as some anti-Vatican II people  maintain;  it was  already happening.  Cardinal Hoeffner  spoke  at  the Council in 1963 of “the tragic fall of so many Christians into indifference, lukewarmness and unbelief”.  (2)

G.S. Johnston wrote that “the average pre-Vatican II Catholic was concerned more with having the faith than living it.  The Council was a call to full spiritual maturity.  It was time to take off the training wheels.  The Council urged us to rise above a minimalist, rules-orientated Catholicism and to embrace full discipleship of Jesus”.  (3)

The great French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, “maintained that a malaise had been building in the Church for half a century, a lack of motivation on the part of Catholic people to enter into a deeper relationship with the Lord.  The call to sanctity was far from catching on”.  (4)

The Council tried to address this with a great “call to holiness” in the document on the Church (L.G. Chapter 5). The Catholic Charismatic Renewal seemed like an answer to this call.

If the Pope and all the bishops of the Church were wrong in calling the Council, then this calls the whole credibility of the Church into question (as Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre did) and the words of Jesus about being with his Church until the end of time (Mt 28:20).  No Catholic could countenance such a thing.

JESUS NOW AND FOREVER:

        Gaudium et Spes goes on to maintain that “beneath all that changes there

is much that is unchanging, much that has its ultimate foundation in Christ who

is the same yesterday, today and forever” (G.S.10).  I thought this analysis of

the world in which I lived was very perceptive.  The Church, Gaudium et Spes

said “should be able to answer the ever recurring questions which men ask about the meaning of life” (G.S.4)

BIBLE STUDY:

        The Vatican II liturgy document Sacrosantum Concilium said that Bible services should be encouraged (S.C.35) and my novitiate had plenty with the help of Thierry Maertens” Bible Themes.  They opened up the Word of God for us.   I will never forget the psalm I came across as if for the first time:  “God drew me from the mirey clay, set my feet upon a rock and made my footsteps firm” (Ps.39).  The Bible and the teaching of the Church supplied the meaning we need, the analysis of the signs of the times” and a rock for our feet.  I was no longer in freefall!

Unfortunately, many Vatican II recommendations like Bible services disappeared (except for Charismatic groups), as well as participation in the prayer of the faithful. (S.C.53) and the Divine Office (S.C.83f.), communal penitential services (S.C.109), agape meals (A.A.8), one bread (L.G.7) that ‘looks like bread’ (GIRM283) for the Eucharist etc.

THE SPIRIT OF VATICAN II:

        The Vatican Council produced many readable and perceptive documents.   But parallel to this was the counterfeit, spurious, “spirit of Vatican II”.  This was a nebulous, catch-all term which could be interpreted any way at all without any warrant or justification from the Vatican documents themselves.  In an age of shifting definitions (or relativism) this spirit of Vatican II was a child of its times.  It was an accommodation to the prevailing culture, to the zeitgeist, to the fashion of the hour.  It recognised only one infallibility:   the infallibility of current fashion.  Someone has said that “a church that is married to the spirit of the age.......  will be a widow in the next.  We are not set on this earth to help a fallen world function smoothly.......  We are signs of contradiction or we are nothing”.  (5)

        Bishop Walter Kasper said “For many the Council had become a council of wishes which had nothing to do with the reality of the council documents.  Everything is reduced to slogans about openness to the world and the democratization of the Church”.  (6) The ‘Spirit of Vatican II’ tends to quote the theologians or periti who attended the Council, and not the documents.  But we cannot put theologians (no matter how great their personality cult) on the same level as papal or magisterial teaching, even if they attended the Council.  Around 1980 Hans Küng said that he was ready to ”learn and to be corrected, but only whenever it is a question of discussion between equal partners in a collegial spirit”!  Theologians do not decide these things “as equal partners” with the Magisterium.  (7)

ANECDOTAL COUNCIL:

    There was also an anecdotal council.  Again it ignores the documents and gives anecdotes e.g. ‘Pope John said to me quietly on the way to the Forum’, or, “over coffee in the Piazza, Cardinal X hinted that XYZ would happen”.  Avery Dulles S.J. said that Henri de Lubac perceived in post-conciliar Catholicism “a self-destructive tendency to separate the spirit of the council from its letter”. (8)   

THEOLOGIANS:

        Theologians are entitled to their opinions, as indeed you and I are, and there has always been a legitimate science - that of speculative theology.  Sometimes there seems more emphasis on the speculative than on theology!  But theologians are not the formal teaching authority, that is the Magisterium, and we are not under any obligation to follow their opinions.  Bishops obviously get numerous references in the documents, whereas theologians get only one mention in the index to the Abbot edition of the documents.  But payback time was coming:  the rise of the theologians!

        Since Vatican II, theologians seem to have assumed a status they never had before.  This was probably what Cardinal Heenan was referring to during the Council, when he stated as regards theologians:

        “I fear periti when they are left to explain what the bishops meant”.               

You know the style:  “What the bishops meant to say was ...” or, “What the bishops were trying to say is...”, etc. etc.   This was to lead to great confusion.  Because the bishops used theologians as advisers, or even quoted from their works, does not mean that they endorsed their works.  Not one of the periti is quoted in the documents.

        In line with St Paul’s verse “test everything, hold fast to what is good” (1Th 5:21) the Magisterium has done just that  -  accepting this, or rejecting that : for example in the case of two theologians who were not totally orthodox  -   Origen and Tertullian.  It has never been the other way round.  Without the authority of the Church, we would be like a rudderless ship  -  adrift in a sea of relativity.   Teilhard de Chardin said “how lucky we are to have the authority of the Church!  Rudderless, where on our own would we drift?”   (10)

        According to Lumen Gentium (n.25), only infallible teaching exacts the total submission of faith; while the teaching of popes or bishops, that is not declared as infallible, should be accepted with religious assent, submission of mind and will, due in a special way to the successor of Peter.

        What reflects the mind of the Pope, can be known from the content of the documents he issues, from the manner of his speaking, and from his frequent repetition of the same teaching.   The International Theological Commission’s Theses on the Relationship Between the Ecclesiastical Magisterium and Theologians (1976) states, that theological work by the theologians “is to lend its aid to the Magisterium which, in its turn, is the enduring light and norm of the Church”.

ASSENT OF FAITH:

        As Catholics, it is good to briefly recall what the assent of faith entails.  When we are converted and acknowledge our utter dependence on God, and commit our lives totally to Christ, and to following the Gospel, we come under the obedience of faith (Rom 16:26), and assent to all that Jesus taught, including his setting up the Church, as “the pillar and the ground of truth” (1 Tim 3:15), and his appointment of Peter (and his legitimate successors, the popes), as his Vicar on earth.

        If we reject Peter and  his legitimate successors, then, in a  sense, we reject  Jesus (Lk 10:16) – such is the charism and power Jesus has entrusted to the Petrine Leadership.  We cannot accept Jesus and reject the Church (Acts 9:4).

        “Without the Church, Christ evaporates, or crumbles or disappears”, Teilhard maintained (11).  We must always obey the Church and the legitimate successors of the Apostles, unless it is manifestly wrong and goes against our conscience.  The Vatican Council said that “conscience ought to be conformed to the law of God in the light of the teaching authority of the Church, which is the authentic interpreter of divine law”.  (G.S.50)

        Cardinal Newman said “we need to trust the Church of God, at least implicitly, even when our natural judgement would prefer to take a different course”.  The same gamble we take in entrusting our whole lives to Jesus, the Head, applies also to his Body, the Church.

        This is not a blind leap of faith, as the Catholic Church’s teaching is the most consistent body of doctrine in Christendom and has led countless people to the heights of holiness.  The vicars of Christ have been some of the most remarkable men in history, including Pope John Paul II.  His life of courage and integrity under Nazism and then Communism, shows up the shallowness, petulance and vexatiousness of so many heterodox theologians.

DISSENT:

        The New Testament warns of wolves appearing dressed as sheep.  Any Christian literature that ignores the Scripture and the constant teaching of the Church, should also be ignored.  Reading such could endanger our faith.

        Will Herberg, the Jewish philosopher, once remarked that no reform movement in the Catholic Church through 2000 years has had lasting success, if it was opposed to, or unsupported by the Holy See.  In other words, as Thomas Dubay maintains, “dissent may arrive flashily on the scene, but it eventually withers away, or is splintered into pieces against the Petrine rock”. (12)

WE ARE CHURCH:

        Look at what happened in America in May 1996, where a coalition of dissident American Catholics came together under the title ‘We are Church’, and with great publicity from the secular media announced a massive petition drive, designed to bring about fundamental changes in the Church.

        Their plan involved the collection of one million signatures on a ‘referendum’, calling for radical changes in the Church.  Finally, on October 11 – the 35^th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II “We are Church” announced a paltry 35,000 signatures in America with a population of 62 million Catholics  - 0 .06 percent of the eligible population! (13)

        They got, and still do get, massive publicity from the media which has a strong bias against the Catholic Church.  Fr Benedict Groeschel, the famous Franciscan priest and psychologist, said that “the media is involved in a huge undermining of Catholic and Evangelical Churches”.  Time magazine lauded the heterodox Dutch Catechism as “destined to teach the world”,  but ignored the  orthodox  Catechism of the Catholic Church!   It is sad that dissident groups expend so much energy  on things that are destined to wither away as Dubay maintains.

ROCK OF AGES:

        The Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ, on Peter the “rock”, has seen incredible storms in the course of her history, and still has survived.  This fact surely indicates the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as lesser institutions would have collapsed ages ago.  No wonder that the great Protestant historian, J.A. Froude, was led to concede: “The Roman Church, after all, is something: it will survive all other forms of Christianity; and without Christianity what is to become of us?” (14)

        Another great Protestant historian, who had no great liking for the Catholic Church, but who could make an objective assessment – Lord Macaulay – said, there was never an institution on earth, like the Roman Catholic Church, which has seen the demise of so many historical institutions and may still exist, when London is a heap of ruins! (15)  Remarkably, the Papacy is still the oldest institution in the world and is not planning to keel over in the near future!

        One of the theologians on the Council was Karl Rahner, who suggested the need for a “second Magisterium” with theologians as a buffer between Pope and people.  (16)  But this would not work as none of the personality-cult figures seem able to agree about anything.  To be an authentic theologian demands humility, or self-emptying, so as to be filled with the Spirit of God.  But this is so often lacking in people who are always contentious.

        Thomas Dubay said that one of the reasons the idea of a “parallel Magisterium” completely failed a few years ago, is that it simply would not be possible to create a dual Magisterium (one official, one unofficial).  Dissent is so divided that five magisteria would not be enough to represent all the shades of thought, all the manners of rejecting Catholic teaching!” (17)

        Dubay says that even in biblical scholarship, theologians cannot agree, and that Edward Schillebeeckx, who is so open to historical criticism, has confessed his frustration with New Testament commentators, in finding not a single text in the New Testament on which all theologians completely agreed!  (18)

        This definitely points up the need for a final arbiter – a Magisterium.

THEOLOGICAL SHENANIGANS:

        As a seminarian, often our classes could be boring, but the shenanigans of the theologians over the years kept us amused.  First we lost our own gifted English theologian, Charles Davis, who left Rome for Florence (his future wife).  Peritus Karl Rahner, called Peritus Hans Küng a liberal Protestant, and this seemed to be confirmed later by reports that Küng’s Christology was functional or adoptionist, and that he did not believe in the deity of Christ.   In spite of this, one of our seminary theologians began a series of public lectures based on Küng’s On Being a Christian.  This professor subsequently left and married a nun.

        Another of our seminary theologians, who was in Rome during the Council, studying Liturgy, came back to the U.K. seemingly to supervise the smashing of our altars and altar rails.  During his classes we never studied the Vatican document on the Liturgy or the introductions to the new sacramental rites.  Instead we had lectures on the phenomenology of the Liturgy and composed our own Eucharistic prayers, with Mass readings from Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire and Kalil Gibran!  He also left to marry and take up a post at Notre Dame in America.

KŰNG AND TEILHARD:

        Another peritus at the Council was the Jesuit scholar, Henri de Lubac, who was appointed by Pope John XXIII to advise him personally.  He described Hans Küng as speaking in “incendiary, superficial and polemical terms”, and had “juvenile audacity”!  Things haven’t changed much!  In more recent times the popular Jewish writer, Eugene Fisher, referred to   Küng’s ‘ furious polemic’.  St Peter exhorts us:  “always have an answer ready for people who ask you he reason for the hope that is in you, but do it with courtesy and respect”. (1 Pet 3:15)

        The Jesuit theologian, Fr Gerald O’Collins S.J., had a scathing critique of Küng’s book “Credo : the Apostle’s Creed Explained”.  O’Collins quotes a Jewish friend as saying Küng no longer believes in the divinity of Jesus.   In Küng’s book, Jesus comes across as “the definitive prophet .... but not as God’s self-gift in person”.  Any talk of incarnation is to be buried as a ‘Greek conceptual model’.  O’Collins says ‘the work is deeply flawed’ ..... Küng dismisses Hellenistic councils, including Hellenistic myths about the son of God’s metaphysical procreation”.   O’Collins concludes:  “intellectual integrity means I must part company with Küng”. (19)

        Küng, for his part, dismissed Karl Rahner’s anonymous Christianity theories.  So did Hans von Balthasar, who helped found the periodical Communio as a counterblast to Concilium, which promoted these ideas of Rahner, etc.

        Another Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, was written off by Karl Barth as a ‘gnostic heretic’, (20) and Fordham University professor, Dietrich von Hildebrand, called him ‘Tryhard the Charlatan’!  Fr Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit General, declared that Teilhard’s “third way” dating for priests was unacceptable, (21) and British theologian,R.C. Zaehner, talked of Teilhard’s ‘near-manic optimism’. (22) Fr Mark Hegener ofm  criticised Hans Küng and other theologians like him : Gary Wills and Daniel Callahan, for heading up a rebuild of the Church movement on the fringes. (23)  Of course, we cannot put Teilhard, a loyal son of the Church, in the same category as Küng.  It is true that, prior to Vatican II, Teilhard was under a cloud, but was subsequently rehabilitated by the Vatican, with a caution.

ANDREW GREELEY:

        Gregory Baum, one of the periti at the Council, stated that theologian Andrew Greeley’s New Agenda criticizes liberals who wish to prune religion to the bare essentials.  They suffer from the same rational misconception of religion implicit in much of the Old Agenda  -  “applying a highly rational understanding of religious truth, they wish to make the Christian religion conform to the present cultural experience”  (24) -  to the zeitgeist.

        Greeley had little use for the much touted theology of liberation, and denounced Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire as “narrow ideological enthusiasts and political innocents abroad”.  (25)  The ex Franciscan, Leonardo Boff, was another innocent abroad, because as East Europeans were smashing down the Berlin Wall and kicking over Communism, he appealed to them to give it another try as genuine Marxism had much to offer!  Boff would not have appreciated the anti-communist joke popular at the time: “What is communism? Communism is the longest and most painful route from capitalism to capitalism”!

        Boff was also to leave the priesthood as he had started a ‘post-modern relationship’ in 1981 with a female theologian, and divorced mother of six. (26)

TILLICH AND BARTH:

        Then there was Paul “Shaking the Foundations”  Tillich who, according to his wife’s biography, was deeply into Zen Buddhism, the occult and pornography.  On his deathbed he was offered a reading from the Bible or the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead, and chose the  latter.  (27)  Tillich’s nemesis was Karl Barth, who described as ‘abominable’ Paul Tillich’s theories about God.  He also dismissed John Robinson’s book Honest to God as “O abyss of banality”.  Barth was a friend of Hans Küng, but feared that he was repeating the errors of the old Protestant liberals.  Barth predicted that ‘sooner or later’ Church authorities would have to act against Küng.  (28)

        Tillich and Barth, of course, are not Catholics, but I include them as in my seminary their books were shelved on the same shelves as Catholic books, and they were quoted with Catholic writers in essays, lectures and in magazines like Concilium, as if all voices and positions were equally valid, as if tradition did not matter.

ANTHONY DE MELLO:

        De Mello was an Indian theologian and his books were best sellers.  A fellow Jesuit bemoaned the fact that de Mello “was led in the last years of his life to divest himself of all belief systems ..... and that by the time de Mello reached the end of the road, he was fully out of the orbit of Catholic thought”  De Mello himself related how a French journal had once remarked that if the Jesuits wished to break with the Pope, they would make him their Father General ! (29) 

RUETHER AND KŰNG:

        The feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Hans Küng’s alter ego, was criticized in 1980 for her “perennial strident invitation to a populist revolt in the Church, which will subvert both the academic and the ecclesiastical institutions”. (30)  A long march through the institutions?  It is not surprising that the Jewish writer, Eugene Fisher, years later, in his biography, was to place “Küng’s work alongside Ruether’s ‘in the polemical category’”.    (31)

        Both of them seem to be zero population growth and abortion advocates.  Ruether echoed the cold sentiments of eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, when she suggested that we should ‘find the most compassionate way to weed out people’. (32)  The insensitive Küng at the UNISA Missiological Congress in 1986 in Pretoria, which I attended, accused a startled Dutch Reformed theologian, Prof J.A. van Rooy, of talking like a Catholic priest, as his talk on a Zulu healing centre at Kwasizabantu never once mentioned contraception!  Küng said he had just come from Zambia where native women often had a baby on the breast, one on the back and one on either hand.  He obviously took offence.   The thick-skinned, ivory towered academic would not know that in many poor countries where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ with high infant mortality rates, a big family is the only way to ensure some security and protection in old age.  Hans Küng’s lecture was never published, but Prof van Rooy’s was!

        The point of all this discursus is to show that a parallel Magisterium by theologians would not work as they can’t agree on anything.  Hans Küng may speak in an infallible way and, like Jesus, refer to no other authority in heaven or on earth, than himself,  dismissing traditional theology as “Denzinger theology”, but it is probably best to have only one infallible person : the Pope, and one Magisterium to avoid confusion!  The only thing some theologians have in common is a great antipathy to Rome!

CALL TO OBEDIENCE:

        However, not all theologians were like those described above.  Some, like Congar, de Lubac, von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, were men of dignity, restraint and holiness – even when silenced as part of a testing process. St Paul, writing to Timothy, the bishop, says:  “Preach the message, and welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience......... The time will come when, far from being content with sound teaching, people will be avid for the latest novelty and collect themselves a whole series of teachers, according to their own tastes, and then instead of listening to the truth, they will turn to myths”.  (2 Tim 4:1f)

        Scripture says that the Lord ‘tests the just and the wicked’ (Psalm 11).  Jesus tested his disciples, e.g. Philip (Jn 6:6).  Paul tests the Corinthians:  “For this is why I wrote that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything”.  (2 Cor 2:9).  Paul even turned over one miscreant to Satan to be punished, so that his soul could be saved. 

        The Psalms sum up the attitude of the humble recipient of correction:  “If a good man strikes or reproves me, it is kindness,  but let the oil of the wicked not anoint my head”.  The humble realise that “in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom 8:28).  St Francis wrote “Blessed is the servant that on being reproved cheerfully agrees, modestly complies, humbly confesses and readily makes amends”.

        But there are proud spirits who can’t be told anything, they react to obedience as “if their consciences are branded as with a red hot iron” (1 Tim 4:2).  Their response is defiance : non serviam!  The Letter of Jude warns of these defiant types, saying that their lack of knowledge results from the fact that they do not possess the Spirit, they know nothing except what they have learnt through their unaided natural powers. (cf. v.10)

        St Paul, writing to the bishop Timothy, as quoted above, says he must “call to obedience”.  In the tradition of the Church this is particularly the role of the bishop of Rome, the Pope.  Cardinal Newman noticed in his study of the early church, that popes had always seemed to act in disputed matters of faith as if they had the right to the last word.   Fr Michael Austin S.J. pointed out:  “It seemed as if they too shared in Christ’s guarantee to his Church that the Holy Spirit would protect it from error, and guide it into truth.   So Newman accepted the infallibility of the Pope – that the bishop of Rome, as head of the Church on earth, under very special circumstances, was protected from officially teaching religious error”.  (33)

THEOLOGY AND HOLINESS:

        The German theologian, Anton Grabner-Haider, in his moving book “Letters To A Young Priest From A Laicized Priest” wrote:

        “It seems to me that we need to maintain the tension between ‘sitting’ and ‘kneeling’ theology; that is the only way to avoid serious mistakes in our thinking”.   He points out that ”some theologians in their quest for a theology meaningful to their contemporaries, have looked far afield among writers and philosophers, regarded as modern, but in the process, had unfortunately forgotten the lives of the Saints who had translated  Christ’s way of life into the life of their own times”. Theologians like St Thomas Aquinas, or St Bonaventure.

        The latter could have had Aquinas in mind when he wrote about growth in theological understanding. He stated that “we should consult grace, not doctrine;  desire, not understanding;  prayerful groaning, not studious reading;   the Spouse, not the teacher;  God, not man;  darkness, not clarity.  Consult not light, but the fire that completely inflames the mind and carries it over to God in transports of fervour and blazes of love”.  (34)

A POPE OF WISHES:

        As stated above by Bishop Walter Kasper, for many the Council had become a “Council of wishes”.   But there was also at the same time a “Pope of wishes” :  Pope John XXIII, who conveniently died in 1963, three years before the end of the Council, so all sorts of spurious sayings could be attributed to him.

        The English writer, Joanna Bogle, wrote:

        “Pope John XXIII has long been the hero of Catholic liberals -  ‘Good Pope John’ who challenged basic Catholic teachings, who believed that all religions were equal, who wanted to change the teaching of artificial contraception, who really sought the ordination of women and/or the abolition of any sense of the ordained priesthood.

        Except that all this is a myth.  He never  -  and I do mean never  -  sought any of these things, and emerges from his published pronouncements, personal spiritual diaries, record of active ministry, and letters to friends and family, as an utterly traditional orthodox Catholic priest, very much of the old school.

        Where did the mythology about John XXIII arise?  Almost certainly in the minds and plans of those who had their own agenda, and who sought a kind of “patron saint”, providing a comfort zone in which to operate and a fantasy to set before those whose support they needed in order to achieve their aims”.

TELLING IT LIKE IT IS:

        Anyone who read Pope John’s Journal of a Soul could see that he was no liberal.  Before the Council he made a trip to the Holy House of Loretto to ask Our Lady’s intercession for the Council’s success.  His spirituality seemed to have been “the garden of the soul” variety.  In 1961, just one year before the Council, he wrote at a personal retreat:

        “  ‘I must beware of the audacity of those who, with unseeing minds led away by secret pride, presume to do God’s work without having been called to do so by God speaking through his Church, as if the divine Redeemer had any need of their worthless co-operation, or indeed of any man’s”, he wrote in 1961, in a retreat during his papacy.  “What is important is to co-operate with God for the salvation of souls, and of the whole world.  This is our true mission, which reaches its highest expression in the Pope”. ‘

        He was probably thinking of some of the contestateurs who would attend the Council as periti.  A few years earlier, when Papal representative in Turkey and Greece, he had written:

        ““The problem of the conversion of the irreligious and apostate world presents one of the mysteries which weigh most heavily on my soul.  However, the solution is not my business but the Lord’s secret.  On my shoulders, on the shoulders of all priests, rests the solemn duty of working together for the conversion of this impious world and for the return of heretics and schismatics to the unity of the Church””.

        Pope John’s own seminary days had been at a time of considerable debate and challenge within the Church;  “The wind of modernity, sometimes impetuous and at other times gentle and caressing, which was afterwards to degenerate in part into so-called  Modernism, was blowing almost everywhere, and was to poison the heart and soul of many.  Especially during the first months it was a temptation to everyone.”  He recalled that the professors were quick to impose restrictions and seemed opposed to any modern trends in study or  ways of thinking: “In fact, after a short time the turn of events proved them quite right and showed the timeliness, foresight, wisdom and practical good sense of their attitude”.  He praised the work of one particular priest, ensuring that “not one of us has faltered or strayed from the straight path of being ‘of one mind with the Church’ in all things.”  It was important, if anything, to be rather strait-laced so that in due course experience could show “the exact middle point where truth, justice, and charity meet”.

        One can’t imagine Pope John writing the Theology of the Body as one of his successors did:  John Paul II.  As a seminarian, John made a resolution never to look a young woman in the face, and years later at a meal, sitting directly opposite a young woman immodestly dressed, he leant over the table and offered the surprised lady an apple, saying it was only when Eve bit the apple that she knew she was naked!

        The liberals quietly forget that Pope John’s encyclical, Veterum Sapientia, was an attempt to revive the study of Latin in the Church.

        Joanna Bogle concludes:

        “To claim him as a model for those who should disobey the Church, even in quite small things, is to dishonour his memory,  falsify history, and make nonsense of a life given over wholly to a particularly traditional brand of Roman Catholicism.”  (35)

POPE JOHN ANDTHE HOLY SPIRIT:

        Though Pope John did not live to the end of the Council, his influence has been tremendous, especially in his pushing for a greater role for the Holy Spirit, the “forgotten Paraclete”.  John was instrumental in praying for a New Pentecost for the Church in the modern era, and even before he became Pope, he was closely familiar with the work of the Spirit and the extraordinary and indispensible charismatic gifts.  As holiness or sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit, holiness for all was greatly emphasised at the Council.  Here is Pope John’s prayer for the Council:-

        “O Holy Spirit, sent by the Father in the name of Jesus, who art present in the Church and dostinfallibly guide it, pour forth, we pray, the fullness of Thy gifts upon the Ecumenical Council.

        Enlighten, O most gracious Teacher and Comforter, the minds of our prelates who, in prompt response to the Supreme Roman Pontiff, will carry on the sessions of the Sacred Council.

        Grant that from this Council abundant fruit may ripen; that the light and strength of the gospel may be extended more and more in human society;  that the Catholic religion and its active missionary works may flourish with ever greater vigour, with the happy result that knowledge of the Church’s teaching may spread and Christian morality have a salutary increase.

        O sweet Guest of the soul, strengthen our minds in the truth and dispose our hearts to pay reverential heed, that we may accept with sincere submission those things which shall be decided in the Council and fulfil them with ready will.

        We pray also for those sheep who are not now of the one fold of Jesus Christ, that even as they glory in the name of Christian, they may come at last to unity under the governance of the one Shepherd.

        Renew Thy wonders in this our day, as by a new Pentecost.  Grant to Thy Church that, being of one mind and steadfast in prayer with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and following the lead of blessed Peter, it may advance the reign of our Divine Saviour, the reign of truth and justice, the reign of love and peace.  Amen.”

        While still Bishop Roncalli, Pope John used to visit, in the 1930’s, a tiny Czechoslovakian village of about 300 people, where for many centuries, all the Catholics had experienced the full spectrum of Charismatic gifts, as recorded in  1 Cor.12-14, and Pentecost as a daily reality as a result of an apparition of Our Lady in the eleventh century, during a devastating famine.  (36)

        The many references to the charisms in the Vatican documents can probably be seen as Pope John’s influence, and the exponential growth of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, is probably also attributable to his prayer and guidance.  The theologian, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa ofmCap, said of the twentieth century Pentecostal and Charismatic movement:  “Many seriously believe that this is the greatest spiritual upsurge in the whole history of the Church” (Come Creator Spirit, p.54).   Charisms are mentioned in the following documents :   Lumen Gentium  4, 12;  Unitatis Redintegratio 2;  Apostolicam Actuositatem 3, 30;  Ad Gentes 28;  Presbyterorum Ordinis 6, 9 etc. etc.   One of these charisms is Discernment of Spirits  (1 Jn 4:1;  2 Jn.7:10;  Heb 5:14;  Acts 17:11)

GNOSTICISM:

        In South Africa we badly need  this gift of  discernment with so  many promoting Gnosticism in the form of the Enneagram etc.  The Jesuit, Dr Mitch Pacwa S.J., dismissed the Enneagram as “theological nonsense” and Pelagian self – salvation through a man made technique not by God’s grace”. Some theologians here are also pushing the Gnostic Gospels and seem to give them the same credibility as the canonical scriptures.  (37)   Aideen Gonlag wrote of one priest that “he should value more the letters of Paul, rather than the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas, which he seems to favour”.  ( Southern Cross 2.5.12)

        Elaine Pagels, fond though she had grown of Gnosticism, admitted  in the Gnostic Gospels that ancient Gnosticism died and Catholicism lived because of the Church’s Sacraments and moral teachings affirming  the goodness of the natural order, of marriage, procreation, childbirth and practical charity, are exactly what people need to make ordinary life sacred”.  (38)   All the above endorsed by the Vatican Council and often embarrassing to theologians.

        Centering Prayer (C.P.) called “Transcendental Meditation for the Christian Market” is also promoted. (39)  I did Transcendental Meditation and C.P. for years and agree with the famous French Algerian nun and author, Mother Veronica Goulard of Malawi Poor Clares, who taught TM for years, that “Centering Prayer is Transcendental Meditation and nothing else”.  (40)   C.P. is promoted by Contemplative Outreach (RSA) which also promotes New Age gnosticism like the Enneagram. (41) See Appendix for more on this.

THEOLOGIANS VERSUS HIERARCHY:

        Since the Vatican Council many theologians are of the opinion that they could run the Church better than the bishops.  Fr H. Van Straelen S.V.D published in 1965, before the end of the Council, his book “The Catholic Encounter With World Religious”.  He stated the “never has there been in the history of the Church, so many urgent statements issued by the official Church on the urgency of missionary work countered by so many forces, at the same time working in the opposite direction and emanating from theologians who have an alternative agenda”.  (42)

        The Redemptorist theologian, Francis Xavier Durrwell, in 1967, also noticed these forces working in the opposite direction to the true spirit of the Second Vatican Council.  He criticises Karl Rahner and other theologians.  For example, when the Council says that non-Christians are ordered to salvation (L.G. 16), the theologians say this means that they therein attain salvation.   When the Council says that God, in ways known to God alone, can lead people to faith, even though they have not been able to hear the Gospel,  F.X. Durrwell states that the theologians say this means that God gives such people the faith or, they have the faith. (43)  Joseph Ratzinger has suggested that what devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council itself, but the refusal of so many to accept it.   Or explain it away like the theologians above.

DENZINGER THEOLOGY:

        Because Karl Rahner was a peritus at the Council, his teaching is given about the same status  by some theologians as Vatican II texts themselves.  Subsequent  popularist theologians, using Rahner’s interpretation as a starting point, go on to speculate further from untenable premises and the present worldwide confusion in mission is the result.  Official theology is dismissed as “Denzinger theology”.  Denzinger was a theologian who authored the Enchiridion Symbolorym et Definitionum in 1854  -  a handbook on the decrees and enactments of the Councils.

        Since Vatican II also refers to these decrees and enactments of the Councils, including Trent and Vatican I (see the footnotes to all the Vatican documents  - there is continuity not rupture) that makes Vatican II “Denzinger theology” also!

        This theologising from faulty premises by the “Council of Wishes” theologians can discredit the whole theological enterprise or science of theology (because it is a science) and bring it into disrepute.   For example, “the Vatican is entitled to its opinions and I have mine”.  This is relativism.  Let’s relativise the relativisers!

ECCLESIASTICAL EXPERTOCRACY:

        Tommaso Ricci believes the crisis in the Church “is, above all, a crisis of that ‘ecclesial expertocracy’ which, since the time of the Council, has claimed for itself the right of Leadership over the people of God, often comforted in this pretext by the fearful acquiescence of some bishops and by the adulation, not without a price, of the mass media ........ but today, confronted with a Pope who vigorously reaffirms the inalienable right to lead the Christian community which belongs to the bishop, successor of the apostles (who were not chosen by Christ after a theology exam), this group feels its own power reduced”.

        Hubert Jedin, the Catholic historian, compared today’s crisis with that of the 16^th Century, which led to the Lutheran revolt.  He wrote:

        “Without in the least wishing to minimise the errors and omissions which were made even, and in particular by, the Roman Curia, it must be said that the passivity of the German episcopate facilitated the growth, almost undisturbed, of the Lutheran movement..........  Nothing favoured the schism as much as the illusion of its non-existence”.  (44)

MARCH OF THE INTELLECTUALS:

        The worldwide growth of the movement to replace or hamstring the hierarchy grows apace by liberal theologians.   Paul Lakeland and David O’Brien believe that the hierarchical view of authority  -  with authority vested in the papacy and the clergy, is just one more sign of what Lakeland calls the “infantilization of the laity”.   He argues for an “accountable Church” with a “liberated laity”.  By this, Lakeland means liberated from the authority of the hierarchy!  “Helping the laity to name their oppression is probably the most important thing the theologian can currently do for the Church”, he claims. (45)

        O’Brien and Lakeland are joined by several  Catholic historians who are attempting to convince Catholics that the current claims to authority by the bishops are not in keeping with the true intentions of the Church itself   e.g. Michael Lacy’s  The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity with an enthusiastic endorsement on the back cover by Paul Lakeland.   The Catholic Theological Society of America wrote a scathing letter complaining about the ‘lack of dialogue’ from the bishops.  The media loved it!  It’s alarming that the only news most Catholics get is slanted or biased against the hierarchy.

        In 2010 when Phoenix (Arizona) Bishop Thomas Olmsted declared St Joseph’s Hospital could no longer call itself Catholic because medical professionals at the hospital had performed a direct abortion, hospital leaders claimed that the advice they had received from a Marquette theologian contradicted the opinion of the bishops.  They chose the advice of the theologian! (46) America is the bellwether for the rest of the world.  Developments there are soon replicated in other parts of the world.

S.A. HIERARCHY “RETROGRESSING”:

        We in South Africa are playing catch up quickly;  when the bishop’s theologian, Brian Gaybba, dismissed fears that Vatican II’s good work was being undone, Fr Albert Nolan disagreed.  He said at a We Are All Church meeting that Catholics are despondent about the undermining of the Vatican Council and the “hierarchy are retrogressing”.  (47)

NEW ARRIVALS AND OLD SURVIVALS:

        What is disturbing about all these new dissident renewal movements flocking into South Africa, like We Are Church, and Call to Action etc., is their relativising of the hierarchy and their espousal of the ideas of people, like Hans Küng, even though he is no longer a Catholic theologian  -  some would say no longer a Christian theologian because of his adoptionist Christology .  No-one seems to have noticed.

        Bishop Bruskewitz, in America, excommunicated those in his diocese that belonged to the Call to Action (We are Church is an affiliate of this).  The Vatican, in 2007, upheld the CTA excommunication.

        But away back in 1975, the South African Dutch Reformed theologian, Professor W.D. Jonker, did notice this worrying aspect in Küng’s new book On Being A Christian, and said:

        “Hans Küng, because of his Christology, is clearly characteristic of a functional Christology which sees Christ as a human being in whom God revealed Himself”. (48)

        Modern adoptionists insist over and over again that Jesus is an extraordinary messenger of God, but will not state explicitly that Jesus is God.

        Here is Hans Küng’s version of adoptionism:

        “The whole point of what happened in and with Jesus depends on the fact that, for believers, God himself as man’s friends was............. definitely revealing himself in this Jesus who came among men as God’s advocate and deputy, representative and delegate........”  (49)

        Later the Jesuit theologian, Gerald O’Collins S.J., was to write a scathing review of Küng’s new book on the Creed  -  no holds barred!

        Robert A. Ludwig’s Reconstructing Catholicism is much touted by these new “Renewal” groups in South Africa.  This book “lays out a popular version of the paradigm analysis Hans Küng has recently elaborated”.

        I wonder if these new “renewal” movements realise the full implications of Küng’s theology?  It posits a model for Christianity, unorthodox, untried and unworkable, and will decimate the Church, I fear.

THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE?

        Roger E. Olson believes that if a theologian denies the divinity of Jesus (which functional and adoptionist do), then it is impossible to carry on business as usual in Christian theology.  He sums this up in 7 points:

           

        1. First a person who denies the deity of Jesus Christ ought not to worship him, as worship belongs only to God. (Hans Küng sees Jesus just as a prophet like Mohammed).

        2. Secondly, a person who denies the deity of Jesus Christ will have to come up with some explanation for why early Christians treated him as God. The anti-Christian Orator, Celsus, ridiculed 2^nd century Christians in the Roman Empire for worshipping a man (i.e. Jesus) as God.  (O’Collins gives Küng’s views:  “any talk of incarnation is to   be buried as a ‘Greek conceptual model’“)

        3. A person who denies the deity of Jesus Christ will have to explain the resurrection of Jesus or deny it.  Wolfhart Pannenberg said that the resurrection was the confirmation of the claims of Jesus Christ which amounted to deity e.g. forgiving sins on his own authority.

        4. A person who denies the deity of Jesus will have to answer C.S. Lewis’  ‘Liar, Lunatic or Son of God’ argument in Mere Christianity.

        5. Deniers of Christ’s divinity will have to redefine salvation away from any recognizable orthodox Christian notion of it towards Pelagianism, for example.

        6. A person who denies the divinity of Jesus should be a pluralist with regard to saviours.

        7. A denier of Christ’s divinity will also have to deny the Trinity.  (O’Collins’ critique of Küng, talks of his “functional version of the Trinity”).  (50)

ANTI CHRIST:

        St John’s first letter says that “the man who denies Jesus is the Christ -  he is the liar, he is the antichrist;  and is denying the Father as well as the Son”. (1 Jn 2:22)   If Jesus is not God, then the Nicene Creed makes no sense  :  Jesus born of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, begotten not made etc.  Cardinal Newman wrote:  “Unlearn Catholicism and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic, in a dreadful, but infallible, succession - only not infallible”. (51)

FURIOUS POLEMIC:

        Hans Küng seems now at the sceptical stage of this regression, having lost his faith in the divinity of Jesus.  A great deal goes out of life and faith if Jesus is not God.  We can’t pretend our Christian life will continue on as before our loss of faith.  I suspect this is why he seems so unhappy and always angry  -  he seems, in fact, to be consumed by anger.  The Jewish writer Eugene Fisher, complains of his “furious polemic”.  (52)

        Küng has launched a new crusade reminiscent of Martin Luther against the Pope and the Vatican.  As the Guardian newspaper headlines put it:

        “CATHOLIC THEOLOGIAN PREACHES REVOLUTION TO END CHURCH’S ‘AUTHORITIAN’  RULE.               HANS KŰNG URGES CONFRONTATION FROM THE GRASSROOTS TO UNSEAT POPE AND FORCE        RADICAL REFORM AT THE VATICAN”.   (53)

        Some commentators compare Hans Küng to Martin Luther, and others to Voltaire (1694-1778) and his vicious slogan against the Church:   “Ecrasez l’infamie” (Crush the accursed thing).  Some Catholics may shrug off this intemperate language as harmless, but our Jewish brethren would not.  They know from history that violent talk can easily become violent action.  The ex Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, once said:  “If I were a Catholic   -  I am a Jew  -  I would be very offended by the anti Catholic attitudes and diatribes”.  (54)

        Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said recently that “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square”! (55) Not so far-fetched when one remembers the very hostile reception Pope John Paul II got on a visit to Holland that shocked Hollanders in South Africa.  The atheist writer, Philip Pullman, in his book The Golden  Compass, has a very evil entity called “the Magisterium”! 

        All around us we see similar signs to those observed by Edmund Burke in the “Enlightened” period before the brutality and slaughter of Catholic priests, nuns and laity by the French Revolution.   Edmund Burke had discerned in the licentious literature and thought of ‘Enlightened’ France, the recrudescence of a lethal aesthetic paganism that Christianity had for more than 15 centuries, disapproved and limited, and whose return paved the way to the catastrophic Revolution.

        Of libertine writers such as the Marquis de Sade and Laclas, even Baudelaire wrote:  “The Revolution was made by voluptuous men.  Licentious books comment on and explain the Revolution”.  Burke saw one of the Revolution’s main causes in a decadent libertine class of people amusing itself with atheism, pornography and cynicism, like so many today.  (Crisis, Sept.1993, p.55)

        Napoleon knew the power of a subversive ideology.  He proscribed the writings of the Enlightenment with the terse comment:  “I am not strong enough to rule a nation that reads Voltaire and Rousseau”.  Dangerous libertarian writers like De Sade have now passed into mainstream culture, thanks to Fabian Socialists like Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood (P.P.), and her clique of devotees comprising Fabians, anarchists, Nazis, militant feminists, eugenicists, two husbands, sundry lovers and assorted sycophants and gigolos, as her son once called them.  (Ugnayan Nov.’95).   P.P. school textbooks in America, discuss freely perversions like ‘autoerotic asphyxia’!  These books are now used in all South African schools.  Never has there been such an eroticised society as ours today, that places no restraints whatsoever on human sexuality.  Aquinas said that ‘impurity leads inevitably to violence’ and this could help explain the violent society we live in.  Pope Benedict’s complaint that ‘filth has entered the church’ is probably the result of Fabian socialist education in schools and the corruption of innocent children.   

        Küng claims he fights for the truth, but the Bible says we should “speak the truth in love”.  (Eph. 4:15)    Küng ignores this.  Gerald O’Collins writes that Küng is offending Eastern Christian sensibilities and harming the ecumenical movement by dismissing the teachings of the first seven ecumenical councils.  (56)   Like Jesus, Küng speaks in an infallible fashion by dismissing tradition and pointing to himself as final arbiter:  He seems to say:  In the past you were taught............ but now I say to you!

        Much of Küng’s writings are ad hominem  -  if you can’t get the ball, get the man!  He sneered at “the Polish Pope” and his supposed intellectual inferiority.  George Weigel, in an open letter to Küng, accuses him of setting “new standards for that distinctive form of hatred known as “odium theologicum”.    (57)

DEATH AWARENESS:

        What is bugging Hans Küng?  Why all the angst?  Why is he so polemical and angry compared to his nemesis, Joseph Ratzinger, who always seems to be serene, a man at peace with himself in spite of all his burdens?  Pope John XXIII, after a sleepless night worrying about the Church, finally prayed ‘Lord it’s your Church, you look after it’, turned over and went back to sleep!  Popes John and Benedict have faith and Küng does not.  He reminds me of so many of the theologians and priests after the Vatican Council, who had drunk deeply at the death knelling poison wells of scepticism and secularism  - they were unhappy, ill at ease, restless and despondent.  Some were addicted to alcohol to deaden the pain and try to fill the aching void in their hearts.

        The biologist, Theodor Dobzhansky, claims that “death awareness is one of the basic characteristics of mankind as a biological species”. (58)  Could Küng’s angst be due to a fear of death, as he is no longer young, but a man in his 80’s?

        Could he agree with St Paul: “to live is Christ, to die is gain” (Phil 1:21)?  As he no longer believes that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19).  There is a wonderful passage in the Vatican document, Gaudium et Spes, which may throw light on Küng’s predicament:

        “It is in regard to death that man’s condition is most shrouded in doubt.  Man is tormented not only by pain and by the gradual breaking-up of his body but also, and even more, by the dread of forever ceasing to be.  But a deep instinct leads him rightly to shrink from and to reject the utter ruin and total loss of his personality.  Because he bears in himself the seed of eternity, which cannot be reduced to mere matter, he rebels against death.  All the aids made available by technology, however useful they may be, cannot set his anguished mind at rest.  They may prolong his life-span;  but this does not satisfy his heartfelt longing, one that can never be stifled, for a life to come.

        While the mind is at a loss before the mystery of death, the Church, taught by divine Revelation, declares that God has created man in view of a blessed destiny that lies beyond the limits of his sad state on earth.  Moreover, the Christian faith teaches that bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned, will be overcome when that wholeness which he lost through his own fault will be given once again to him by the almighty and merciful Saviour.   For God has called man, and still calls him, to cleave with all his being to him in sharing forever a life that is divine and free from all decay.  Christ won this victory when he rose to life, for by his death he freed man from death.  Faith, therefore, with its solidly based teaching, provides every thoughtful man with an answer to his anxious queries about his future lot.   (Gaudium et Spes No. 18)

        But for Küng the adoptionist, there is no “merciful Saviour” and no resurrection, making death an alarming prospect.  In Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort (O Eternity, thou word of Thunder) there are two principal characters; Fear of Death and the Consolation of Hope.  As death approaches, so the voice of fear becomes more shrill.  As death approaches for Hans Küng his voice seems to become more shrill as he urges “the grassroots to unseat the Pope and force radical reform at the Vatican”.

        Another adoptionist was the very popular Bible scholar, William Barclay, who adopted this Christology towards the end of his life, according to his friend John Macquarrie. (59)  At a Bible conference, Barclay approached another Bible scholar, Fr Dermot Cox ofm, and begged him: “Please pray for me Father, I think I’m losing my faith”.  He did not die a happy man.

        Also Voltaire, the fierce critic of the Church, like Küng, did not die a pleasant death.  His last words were “I am abandoned by God and man!  I shall go to hell!  O Christ!  O Jesus Christ!” (60)

        In Bach’s Cantata mentioned above, the struggle between Fear and Hope is resolved in favour of hope, and his work concludes with a piece of music of unsurpassed beauty and trust:  Es ist genug  (It is enough).  Let’s hope Hans Küng can re-find his faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and die in peace, reconciled with his Vicar, the Pope.

READING DOCUMENTS SINE GLOSSA:

        Dr Alan Schreck said: ”The documents of Vatican II are among the great unread documents of our time.”  (61)

In this 50^th year of the Vatican Council we should make an effort to read the Vatican Documents, as they will be our guidelines for a long time to come and to read them sine glossa! (without alteration). People prefer to read commentaries by Vorgrimler, Hastings, but these have their own agenda.  When we read the documents we will be able to distinguish the true from the spurious, the real Council from the false –tradition – averse – spirit – of – Vatican II, which is all in the air, a council of wishes, a nebulous thing, a toxic cloud!

When Pope John XXIII talked of reading the signs of the times, the Spirit of Vatican II people seemed to understand this as spotting the “movers and shakers” so as to conform to the zeitgeist.  In a stirring passage on the need for spiritual warfare, the Council warned “Do not be conformed to this world”         (Rom 12:22) in Gaudium et Spes No. 37.

THE “SPIRIT-OF-VATICAN” II ISSUES

1. THE EUCHARIST                                                                    

       

        By a big majority (2200 to 200)  the bishops of the Council agreed to have the Mass in the vernacular, but “the use of the Latin language .... is to be preserved in the Latin Rites” (S.C.36; 54) and “Gregorian chant .... should be given pride of place in liturgical services” (S.C.116).  Both of these were ignored by those who knew better!  The implication was that no-one wants Latin or Gregorian chant.   But the popularity of Taizé community chants in Latin and the millions of CD’s sold by monasteries of Gregorian chant proved them wrong.

Abbot Boniface, who was a peritus at the Council, and wrote several sections of the Council document Sacrosanctum Concilium, said of the pre-Vatican Council Tridentine Mass “everyone knew it was not sufficient any more” and “everything was rattled off in an un-understandable Latin .... without any concern for active participation”.  But he complains that now “the liturgy has been totally horizontalised, and people are not interested in that;  they want to come to Church to pray.”  (62)

                                  

The Pope, as “Vicar of Christ” (see Lumen Gentium 18), has many titles.  Perhaps another is needed:  the “Tilter of the see-saw”!  When things in the Church tilt too far in one direction in an unhealthy way, the Pope has the duty to intervene to correct the balance as mentioned above, in regard to Cardinal Newman’s observations.  The Tridentine Mass itself was a correction of abuses;  then it became in need of correction as Abbot Boniface said above, and now the abuses in the way the Novus Ordo was celebrated by priests had to be seen to.

Abbot Boniface pointed out that misinformed theologians say that the Priest at the altar facing the people was the norm.  But this was not true except for the four Roman basilicas.  The Abbot observed that the great Jesuit liturgical scholar, Joseph Jungmann “pleaded for not accepting the altar facing the people, because it was the cause of so many abuses”. (63)

Jungmann was also critical of some aspects of the Tridentine liturgy, yet he admits that “the Baroque period itself preferred to draw from secondary channels and yet, from these it nourished an amazingly rich life”.   So it is wrong to ridicule the old Rite as it sustained the faith of millions, including the Irish at their mass rocks during one of the worst periods of their history : the Penal Laws.

        The wishes of the Council Fathers for some Latin to be preserved seems, at the least, to be respected in the new changes in the Mass introduced in Europe.

2. DEMOCRATISATION OF THE CHURCH:

        Some theologians persistently call for democratisation of the Church, but the Church has never been a democracy.

Archbishop Denis Hurley omi, ex Archbishop of Durban, a peritus at the Council, was once asked what right the Catholic Church had to speak about democracy when it is not a democracy itself.  His answer was “I think the response is twofold.  Firstly, the Catholic Church seeks to promote relations among people that are deeper, wider, more meaningful and more effective and more truly human than any political democracy.  Secondly, in promoting these relationships, it is laying the basis of the foundations for the democracy of today.  How is it trying to do this?  By trying to live out the words of the Gospel, especially John chapter 15”. (64)

A contemporary of Archbishop Hurley, Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga of Brazil, once said in a similar vein:  “People say the Church is not a democracy, and that is true. But I don’t want the Church to be a democracy  -  I want it to be something better than a democracy. I want it to be a community”. (65)

The Church, as we can see, is not a democracy, and looking back over 2000 years of Christianity, she gives the impression of being a monarchy or Kingdom!

Fr Anthony Egan S.J. argued that democracy is not inherent in Christianity.  Indeed, the biblical paradigm in both Testaments is that of King and Lord, an idea which moves through the Christian centuries, though not without challenging the state and its rulers, the ‘kings of the earth’.”  (66)

3. SECULARISATION:

        The Vatican Council produced a ground-breaking  document on Ecumenism, to work for the restoration of unity among all Christians.  But there were provisos e.g. : “...... it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone which is the universal help towards salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained”. (V.R.3)  This was echoing Lumen Gentium 14 that “the Church .... is necessary for salvation ....  Hence, they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it, or to remain in it”.

But with the opening of the doors to Ecumenism, non-Catholic theologians were read and influenced many e.g. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  These men translated Luther’s condemnation of works as a condemnation of ‘religion’ and a consequent exaltation of secularity as the valid contemporary expression of mature Christianity.  The Council had no problem with the word ‘religion’, and used it often in Vatican documents.  But many theologians of the zeitgeist had a big problem with the word.

Catholic librarians were not always sure as what to do with all the new non-Catholic books (especially Rudolf Bultmann!) that were becoming popular.  Some put the books in a separate section and others put them all together.  So now Catholic seminary libraries, confusingly, had Catholic books on their shelves cheek by jowl with non-Catholic books, which often gave a radically different viewpoint, ignoring good Pope John’s advice about seminaries that “it was important to be rather strait-laced so that in due course experience could show ‘the exact middle point where truth, justice and charity meet’.”   The picture is even more confusing in ecumenical centres of theological tertiary education where there is no ultimate authority as we have in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  But now it’s all ‘whatever’ theology!

Returning to Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, they helped launch a flood of books on the secular e.g. Harvey Cox’s Secular City which calls for secularisation.  In our seminary Zechariah 14 : 20-21 was often quoted:  that one day ordinary secular objects like cooking pots shall become as sacred as the altar vessels in the Temple.  This and other texts became the cue for using unconsecrated vessels etc. in the Eucharist and for stripping Churches of beautiful artefacts, as I saw brutally done by Catholic Taliban in London churches in Clapham and Forest Gate etc., ignoring the outraged parishioners.  Where was the much vaunted democracy now?  This led to the joke:  Q.  What is the difference between a terrorist and a “liturgist”?  A.  You can convert a terrorist!

Fr Constantine Koser ofm said that “some were so eager to eliminate the false that they blithely eliminated everything good and bad, false and true.  Secularisation for many turns into secularity and worse, secularism.  It breeds a radical and exclusivist ideology which accepts only the secular, the worldly, the profane”. (67)   Because of the total pre-occupation of the South African Church in ousting apartheid, we were spared this awful confusion.  But it’s coming fast with calls not to be too hypersensitive “to the distinction between the sacred and the secular”.  (68)  Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes!

Recently in the Southern Cross, a young priest wrote of how wedding ceremonies had undergone a significant shift from the sacred to the secular.  He said it is difficult to see this as a sacred moment when everything else is so secular.  (69)

(As in Europe after the Council we had theologians sounding off in the National Press taking a controversial stance, when their role is to lend their aid “to the Magisterium which, in its turn, is the enduring light and norm of the Church”. Bishops then have to correct them, and their loudspeaker theology discredits the Church and delights the Secularists!)

Secularisation books were the flavour of the moment and then these were contradicted by other theologians who detected “signals of transcendence” e.g. Peter Berger’s Rumour of Angels.  Harvey Cox admitted he got it wrong and Andrew Greeley, who opposed secularisation ideas loved it, and published gleefully his book The Persistence of Religion.

All this miasma did not come from the Vatican Council but from the toxic “Spirit of Vatican II”!  I have noticed that theologians who lose their faith either secularise (and try to get others to share with them: misery loves company) or  they Gnosticise to try to fill the aching void with New Age Spirituality, like TM or the Enneagram.

4. MERE HUMANISM:

        Another emission from the toxic “Spirit of Vatican II” cloud was the “humanise now” people, and heaven can wait, the ‘vale of tears’ was out, and “holiness is wholeness”.  Even St Irenaeus was conscripted into this with his saying:  “The glory of God is man fully alive”.  the second half of this saying was always ignored, perhaps it was not horizontal enough : “and the life of man is the vision of God”.  St Irenaeus also said “This is man’s glory – to remain steadfast in the service of God”.  (70)  He was probably thinking of Ps.106:47 : “Make it our glory to praise you”.

Also from the pen of St Irenaeus was:  “man did not have the glory of God.  The only way that man could receive this glory was by obeying God”. 

This mere humanism also included the human potential movement with its buzz words:  Self-knowledge, self-expression, self-acceptance, self-realisation  - and through self discovery, infinite potential.  But Jesus promises eternal life through self abandonment and self sacrifice.

        Obviously this emphasis on self is selfish narcissism and not of the Gospel.   Pope Paul VI, in Populorum Progressio, criticises “mere humanism”.  The rather superficial slogan ‘holiness is wholeness’ is obviously not Christian.  Our bodies can be un-whole-some and decaying, yet our spirit can be strong as St Paul says:  “Though this outer man of ours may be falling into decay, the inner man is renewed day by day”. (2Cor 4:16).  We can face diminishment physically, but be fortified spiritually.  For example, St Ignatius of Loyola was fighting fit and pretty whole before his leg was smashed by a cannonball.  Afterwards he was holy, but pretty un-whole-some!  Nearer our own time, Pope John Paul II, in his dying years.

        In Christianity it is probably empirically verifiable that the less people think about the body beautiful and try to cater for its endless desires, the more holy they seem to be.   It is funny seeing the “Spirit of Vatican II” theologians, now no longer young, hobbling around “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” still repeating “holiness is wholeness”, when they are so lacking in the latter!

        This ‘holiness is wholeness’ language, I first came across in Krisnamurti, the theosophist groomed as the next incarnation of the Maitreya, or Christ.  He interpreted holiness as a derivative of wholeness (71).  The Zeitgeist, well on the way to becoming the Weltgeist, not the Christian worldview seems to call all the shots!

        The Jesuit writer, Harvey Egan S.J., gives a word of warning:  that contemporary Christians must be slow to evaluate holiness “in terms of doing good to others, self-actualisation, holistic health and the prevalent beautiful person syndrome”.  The Christian tradition has long valued the lives of victim souls .... God has called some to live a mysticism of the “Suffering Servant”     (72) e.g. Martha Robin – bedridden for most of her life but a mystic who founded the flourishing Foyers de Charité.  Also Fr Justin Feeney CssR, the bedridden Cape Town priest whose last ten years were spent incapacitated, but he exuded a constant radiant smile and serenity that touched all who met him.  As a Victim Soul, he offered up his sufferings for the Redemption of the World.  (73)

5.     RENEWAL OF ‘GOD TALK’:

        During, and after Vatican II, there was a great deal of talk and even more literature on the supposed need to update our theological language.  So we had book titles like Naming The Whirlwind: the Renewal of God Language by Langdon Gilkey;  God-Talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology by John Macquarrie, and God Is A New Language by Sebastian Moore O.S.B. etc., etc.  The blurb of the latter said that it was the author’s belief “that God must be either a totally new language, or a wholly dead word in the modern world.  By that he means that the traditional Catholic conventions about ‘salvation’, ‘love of God’, ‘sin’, ‘morality’ and so forth are symbols which have ceased to correspond to the reality which they are supposed to represent, and that new symbols  -  not to say new meanings  -  must be developed which reflect not only the old realities, but also the new needs of man .... with that in mind he examines many of the symbols to which he objects: God, Jesus, life, death, evil, Christian love pointing out what is amiss in each traditional concept and what is the remedy for each malady .... Christianity, if it is to survive, must learn to communicate in terms intelligible to the twentieth century.

        This book was published in 1967, just a few years after the Council, and, I think, reflects the loss of reality by some theologians.  It is another example of the explosion of ephemara after the Council, which we have seen in the secularisation debate above.  Whole forests of trees have been sent crashing to the ground to publish this transitory material.  The carbon footprint must be enormous and the cue for all this evanescent material did not come from the Council, but from some theologians.

        A lot of the concerns for the above theologians was the problem of meaning and how reality is grasped. But they seemed to have a very cerebral notion of meaning and communication: only 30% of human communication is done through human speech.  The rest is accomplished through ‘body-talk’.      (74)   A world of meaning is not something that stands alone, it has to be embodied by action to be understood.   So, in a sense, we can say ‘I do not know what you mean, till you do what you say!’  Of course, this does not mean that we scrap all systematic and speculative theology.  

Behold I make all things new (Rev. 21:5)

        The theologian, Raniero Cantalamessa, says that:

        “The Holy Spirit, who makes all things new, can renew the dogmas of the Church.  The Spirit does not make new things: rather, the Spirit makes things new.  The Spirit does not give us new dogmas about Christ, but rather makes the old dogmas new, making them pertinent reality effectively at work today as much as they were in ancient times.  Kierkegaard wrote: ‘The dogmatic terminology of the primitive Church is like an enchanted castle where, locked in slumber, lie the handsomest of princes and the loveliest of princesses.  They only need to be aroused, for them to leap to their feet in all their glory’.  The Holy Spirit is the only one who can wake them from their age-long slumber.”  (Come Creator Spirit, pg.364)

6.     CONTRACEPTION

        There are numerous references in the Vatican documents to St Justin’s wonderful statement that there are “seeds of truth among all men”,          (A.G. 3,9,11 etc)  seeds or elements of truth in other religious and philosophies, and this was taken up by theologians like those who wrote the Dutch Catechism (see p.286).  But they studiously ignored the Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, and the atheist, Sigmund Freud:

        “It is futile to hope that the use of contraceptives will be restricted to the mere regulation of progeny.  There is hope for a decent life only so long as the sexual act is definitely related to the conception of precious life.  This rules out perverted sexuality and, to a lesser degree, promiscuity.  Divorce of the sexual act from its natural consequences must lead to a hideous promiscuity and to condoning, if not endorsing, unnatural vice.”

Mohandas Gandhi

        “Moreover, it is a characteristic common to all the perversions, that in them reproduction is put aside as an aim.  This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse – if it departs from reproduction as its aim and pursues the attainment of gratification independently.  You will understand, therefore, that the gulf and turning point in the development of sexual life lies at the point of its subordination to the purposes of reproduction.”    

Sigmund Freud

        I believe that theologians, like Hans Küng, got it badly wrong about contraception, and again they did not find a precedent for their ideas in the Vatican documents.  In fact, just the opposite (e.g. G.S. 47, 51, 87).  But the much vilified Pope Paul VI got it right.  Karl Barth, while disagreeing with the Pope, praised his “heroic isolation”  (75).  But this was not the case with many Catholic theologians.  With infallible certainty that the Pope got it wrong, they lambasted him.  But the Pope was right and they were seriously in error – again!  The Pope warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted, and events have proved him right:

        1.  General lowering of moral standards.

        2.  A rise in infidelity and illegitimacy.

        3.  The reduction of women to objects to satisfy men.

        4.  Government coercion on reproductive matters.

        People, like Küng, have been lionised for their anti-papal stance, but they have been partly responsible for the disastrous Christian population decline in Western Europe, Canada and North America, where streets are bereft of children playing and all one hears is the eerie sound of New Age windbells.  It seems as if a neutron bomb has been dropped. The streets will only echo the sounds of kids playing and laughing in about another twenty-five years, but these kids will all be Muslims, as Muslim families now have 8,1 kids, and Christian 1,8 kids, or none at all.  For these kids, Jesus is not the merciful God, but only a man.

        The decline in the European Christian population is now irreversible, and none of the theologians noticed what was happening!  Abortions and divorces rocketed.  Also contraceptives are poisoning the earth:

        The Guardian newspaper, last year, has a shocking headline:-

£30 billion to purify water system after toxic impact of contraceptive pill  (2/6/12)  - and this is only Britain!  Whilst some theologians berate us for not changing to energy-saving globes, they swallow the camel of world pollution by synthetic hormones.  Blind guides!  By comparison Natural Family Planning (NFP) is ecological, non-invasive, teaches men about the miraculous way that their wives’ bodies work, and divorce among NFP couples is statistically insignificant! (76)  Who do the theologians champion?  The contraceptors, of course.

        On the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II, Hans Küng said he would not be rejoicing, but celebrating a funeral!  In a sense, he was right: this has been fifty deadly years of missed opportunities, misplaced anger, misdirected energies, juvenile audacity, the chasing of the wind, of tradition – averse theology – the very thing Teilhard de Chardin feared – a theology where the roots and all the moorings have been cut in a futile attempt to cast the barque of Peter upon a sea of relativity.  Whole forests of trees have been wiped out to publish the plethora of ephemara mentioned above.  This is not to belittle the good theology that has also been produced since 1962.  The plethora of ephemera reminds me of Don Bosco’s famous dream of the Two Columns : the enemy fleet bombard the Pope’s flagship with a mass of books and pamphlets to try and sink it!

Malcolm Muggeridge, in his autobiography, described his life in socialism, liberalism and practical atheism as Chronicles of Wasted Time!  The same could be said of the last fifty years of rebellion, vexatiousness, and petulance by so many in the Church.  So many dead ends and useless banal speculation.

        Instead of thinking with the Church, (Sentire cum Ecclesia  see A.A.7; R.C.6; L.G.25), we are asked by a theologian, Terence Tilley, to think on the putative artist Andres Sarrano’s crucifix of Jesus in a jar of urine!  (78) 

        Instead of thinking with the Church, aligning their energies with her mission, they have conformed to the world and the spirit of the age in a cowardly, mercenary way against the Church to the adulation of the media.

        As Joseph Ratzinger said above, that what devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council itself, but the refusal of so many to accept it.  Henri de Lubac perceived in post Conciliar Catholicism, ‘a self destructive tendency to separate the Spirit of the Council from its letter’.  The Magisterium was replaced by political correctness, and the most heinous sin was to be politically incorrect.

        Jesus must weep.  He wanted “one flock and one shepherd” (Jn 10:16), prayed fervently that his future disciples would be one (Jn 17).  Instead, we seem to have a plurality of magisteria and a plurality of infallible people.

        In 1979 Cardinal Joseph Hoeffner, president of the German Bishop’s Conference, wrote that “never in human history has there been a religious crisis as serious as that of today”, and that the Church found itself confronting “the most radical challenge of her history,” that is, a  process of secularisation of unprecedented proportions.  (78)

        During and after the Council there was in some quarters, a tremendous over-optimism, almost manic over-optimism, about the Church.  Some would have agreed with William Wordsworth’s words penned at the time of the French Revolution (before he became disillusioned):

        “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive”.

        The period after the Council began with great hopes, at a time when secular humanism seemed to reach its historical apex throughout the world.  In the Church too, there arose “prophets of hope,” preaching the coming of a new age in which a modernized Christianity and self-sufficient world would unite in peace and harmony.  Not a few theologians believed, too ingenuously, that the Council represented this religious utopia.  (82)

        But the thousands of bishops gathered at the Vatican Council, who were not ivory-towered theologians, but pretty streetwise pastors, were under no illusions about the dangers of the world to the Church.  The documents warned of the three main dangers to the faith:  the world, the flesh and the devil;  that we had to be prepared for spiritual warfare, carry the cross and even be ready for martyrdom and death for our precious faith.  I quote some of the main texts:

        Man, therefore, is divided in himself.  As a result, the whole life of men, both individual and social, shows itself to be a struggle, and a dramatic one, between good and evil, between light and darkness.  Man finds that he is unable of himself to overcome the assaults of evil successfully, so that everyone feels as though bound by chains.  But the Lord himself came to free and strengthen man, renewing him inwardly and casting out the “prince of this world” (Jn.12:31), who held him in the bondage of sin.  For sin brought man to a lower state, forcing him away from the completeness that is his to attain.

        Both the high calling and the deep misery which men experience find their final explanation in the light of this Revelation (G.S.3)

        The Christian is certainly bound both by need and by duty to struggle with evil through many afflictions and to suffer death.  (G.S.22)

        FOR THE MONUMENTAL STRUGGLE AGAINST THE POWERS OF DARKNESS PREVADES THE WHOLE HISTORY OF MAN. THE BATTLE WAS JOINED FROM THE VERY ORIGINS OF THE WORLD AND WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THE LAST DAY, AS THE LORD HAS ATTESTED.  CAUGHT IN THIS CONFLICT, MAN IS OBLIGED TO WRESTLE CONSTANTLY IF HE IS TO CLING TO WHAT IS GOOD.  NOR CAN HE ACHIEVE HIS OWN INTEGRITY WITHOUT VALIANT EFFORTS AND THE HELP OF GOD’S GRACE.

        That is why Christ’s Church, trusting in the design of the Creator, acknowledges that human progress can serve man’s true happiness.  Yet she cannot help echoing the Apostle’s warning:  “Be not conformed to this world” (Rom.12:2).  By the world is here meant that spirit of vanity and malice which transforms into an instrument of sin those human energies intended for the service of God and man.  (G.S.37)

        We have been warned, of course, that it profits man nothing if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself.  (G.S.37)

        Christ’s example in dying for us sinners teaches us that we must carry the cross, which the flesh and the world inflict on the shoulders of all who seek after peace and justice.  (G.S.38)

        On earth, still as pilgrims in a strange land, following in trial and in oppression the paths he trod, we are associated with his sufferings as the body with its head, suffering with him, that with him we may be glorified (cf.Rom.8:17).  (L.G.7)

        Christians must be prepared for continual conversion and in the wrestling against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of iniquity (Eph.6:12).  (L.G.35)

Martyrdom makes the disciple, like his master, who willingly accepted death for the salvation of the world, and through it he is conformed to him by the shedding of blood.  Therefore the Church considers it the highest gift and supreme test of love.  And while it is given to a few, all, however, must be prepared to confess Christ before men, and to follow him along the way of the cross amidst the persecutions which the Church never lacks.  (L.G.42)

        In addition, Christians should .....  strive, even to the shedding of their blood, to spread the light of life with all confidence and apostolic courage.  (DH14)

KEEPING THE FAITH:

        How can we guard our faith, the most precious possession we have? Because without faith no-one can see God (Heb.11:6).  With so much confusion sown by supposedly Christian theologians, whom can we trust?

        As mentioned above, as a novice, I was perplexed by all the competing and contradictory theologies, and so decided to do a Bible study on discernment of Spirits, and false prophets who will lead astray even the elect (Mt.24:24), as Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light (2Cor.11:14).  The following texts were helpful:  1 Jn.4:1;  2 Jn.7-10;  Jude;  Office of Readings Vol 1, p.477 (by Diadochus of Photike) and St Cyril of Alexandria (Divine Office II, p.508).  “God implants in his people a sort of affinity with his own nature and that of the Father, by the gift of the Spirit”.  (connaturality);  The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola on Discernment of Spirits, and C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, regarded by Fr Thomas Green S.J. as a twentieth century equivalent of the latter.  Fr Constantine Koser ofm reminds us that the pathways of the Spiritual life are narrow and rough.  “’How narrow is the gate that leads to life and only a few take it’ (Mt.7:14) applies to Christian living in general, and is so much the more to an intense life with God in this earthly time of trial”  (80).

        The anti Nazi war hero and Franciscan tertiary in his invaluable book The Art of Living (or fundamental moral values) writes of the great importance of values like fidelity, an aspect of which is continuity “which first gives to a man’s life its inner consistency, its inner unity... without this capacity for continuity, man would have no inner unity; he would be but a bundle of interwoven impressions and experiences... The constant man alone will be able to assimilate contradictory impressions”. In a world of competing  and contradictory theologies and ideologies we need to be consistent and constant if are to discern the truth and keep our faith, rather than be tossed about by every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14).

        Of course, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is perhaps the best tool for a Catholic, but it was not available to us then, as novices.

        We need to “test everything, and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess.5:21), and that testing includes all Catholic literature, as well as Catholic papers like the Southern Cross – an independent Catholic paper, often criticised by the Bishops.  The Editor had a banner headline in 1998:  ‘Church should accept gay unions’ (8/3/98).  What Cardinal Napier said then still applies:  ‘it causes confusion rather than building faith’.  The Editor submitted an article on 31 July 2002, which stated that there was a ‘gay gene’ and at least 10% of the population is gay.  Both statements are patently false.  The Editor promotes astrology “Hi, I’m an Aries!” (S.C. 14/8/08), which is condemned by the Bible.  He questions the miracle of the loaves and fishes, believing with Bultmann that Jesus only awakened the generosity of the crowd to open and share their lunchboxes! (13/2/02).  No wonder Bishop Risi called the Southern Cross a ‘tuppenny ha’penny publication’ (9/1/2008) that ‘seriously misrepresents the Vatican (S.C. 31/12/08).  Cardinal Napier writes of the “disturbing editorial in which the Editor openly encourages dissent” (18/2/2009).

        However, the greatest error of the Editor is that he regards the Pope and the Bishops as just other voices amongst many  -  all opinions are equally valid  -  you are entitled to your opinion and I’m entitled to mine.  There is no ultimate authority.  This is Relativism.

        As regards ‘gay marriage’ Pope Benedict XVI stated:

        “If it is true that all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legalization of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians.  The Catholic law maker has the moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it.  To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral”.

THE TABLET (OR A BITTER BILL?):

        Another Catholic paper, The Tablet, ignored this completely.  Christopher Derrick, the English writer, was once a book reviewer for The Tablet magazine in London, and his brother was the assistant editor of The Tablet  from 1938 to 1961.  But he became disillusioned with the magazine when John Wilkins, an Anglican convert, schooled in the Anglican tradition of compromise, took over.  In a scathing letter to The Times (4/6/94) Derrick criticises Wilkins for subscribing to the “supreme infallibility of current fashion”.  He presumes to correct the Catechism of the Catholic Church “in the manner of one who knows better” as well as the Pope, numerous Councils, the Fathers of the Church, and Jesus himself!  Under Wilkins’ tenure, Julian Filochowski, civil partner of militant ‘gay’ activist  Martin Pendergast, became a director of The Tablet and the magazine adopted an anti-Roman, pro-gay stance.  So much so that John Smeaton, Director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), called for a complete ban on the sale of the magazine in Catholic parishes (81)

        But what is most dangerous about The Tablet is its relativism.  Statements from the Vatican or the Pope are always questionable  -  that’s their truth, this is ours  -  it’s all relative!  For example, the statement above by the Pope on gay rights.  Also, The Tablet promotes New Age tools like the Enneagram, which are “suspect at the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” it clearly states in The Tablet, 10/3/01, and “criticism of the enneagram was included in a recent Vatican document on New Age beliefs and practices” (22/2/2003 edition).  Having said that, it then goes on to totally ignore this advice and laud the Enneagram.  The Tablet is one of the most influential “Catholic” magazines in the world, quoted avidly and circulated like samizdat!  Pope Benedict, in his limina address to the English bishops, said:  “It is important to recognise dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate”.

        Constantine Koser ofm says re dangerous elements:  “Whether we like it or not, we absorb ..... elements every day in our life, in school, in books, in the communications media with infallible efficiency in a thousand and one ways” (82).  The environment in which we live evangelises us all the time, and so much so that J.L. McKenzie S.J. could state that “anyone who says that his theological thinking rises serenely above the turmoil of contemporary events is lying through his teeth!”  So we have to be eternally vigilant not to be conformed to the world in its disobedience and relativism.

        Pope John Paul II said that one of the most important messages of the Council was the call to holiness (L.G.39-42) and in this section of the documents it mentions the need for sanctification  -  the work of the Holy Spirit.  Billy Graham states that Pope John, the Pope of the Holy Spirit, was asked just before he died what Church doctrine most needed re emphasis today.  He replied “the doctrine of the Holy Spirit”.  (85)  Some theologians seem to have no experience of God’s Spirit in their lives.  If they had, they would not succumb to the temptations of  secularism or Gnosticism.  Pope John Paul II, in his address to the Lituanium bishops (29/9/99) said:

“Catechesis must help people to ‘meet’ Jesus Christ, to converse with him and to immerse themselves in him.  Without the vibrance of this encounter, Christianity becomes a soulless religious traditionalism which easily yields to the attacks of secularism or the enticements of alternative religious offerings.  This encounter then, as experience confirms, is not fostered by dry ‘lessons’ alone, but rather, so to speak, ‘caught’ by the power of a living witness.  Catechesis must rediscover all the warmth of the First Letter of John: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes .... we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us;  and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”” (1 Jn 1:1-3).

        “Without the Holy Spirit:  God is far away, Christ stays in the past, the Gospel is a dead letter, the Church is simply an organization, authority a matter of domination, mission a matter of propaganda, liturgy no more than an evocation, Christian living a slave morality.  But with the Holy Spirit:  the cosmos is resurrected and groans with the birth pangs of the Kingdom, the risen Christ is there, the Gospel is the power of life, the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity, authority is a liberating service, mission is a Pentecost, the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation, human action is deified.”

        Ignatius of Latakia, The Uppsala Report, 1968.

        Geneva, World Council of Churches, p.298

CONCLUSION:

        From the above essay, one can see that it is not necessary to have a PhD in theology to recognise that dissent and relativism are leading to anarchy in God’s beloved Church, and that loyalty and obedience to the Vatican documents sine glossa (including the document’s call to loyalty to the Holy See) is the way out of the miasma.

        Rebellion against Rome by the theologians or theological magazines (e.g. that’s the Pope’s view and I have mine) seems to lead to rebellion right through the whole Church from top to bottom (e.g. that’s the bishop’s view and he’s entitled to it, and I have mine;  or, the priest’s view, and I have mine).

        Disloyal renewal groups, if in good faith, think they are doing what is best for the Church.  But I think Will Herberg’s statement above is an empirical fact, that no reform movement in the Catholic Church through 2000 years has had lasting success, if it was opposed to, or unsupported by, the Holy See.  One has only to look at history which good Pope John called “the teacher of life” to see this.

        A final quotation from the Vatican documents:

        “Bishops who teach in communion with the Roman Pontiff are to be revered by all as witnesses of divine and Catholic truth; the faithful, for their part, are obliged to submit to their bishops’ decision, made in the name of Christ, in matters of faith and morals, and to adhere to it with a ready and respectful allegiance of mind.  This loyal submission of the will and intellect must be given, in a special way, to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra in such wise, indeed, that his supreme teaching authority be acknowledged with respect, and sincere assent be given to decisions made by him, conformably with his manifest mind and intention, which is made known principally either by the character of the documents in question, or by the frequency with which a certain doctrine is proposed, or by the manner in which the doctrine is formulated”.  (L.G.25)

POSTSCRIPT:   POPE BENEDICT ON VATICAN II

There was the Council of the Fathers, the true Council, but there was also the Council of the media.  It was almost a Council in and of itself, ad the world perceived the Council through them, through the media.  So the immediate Council that got through to the people was that of the media and not that of the Fathers.  While the Council of the Fathers evolved within the faith, it was a Council of the faith that sought the intellectus, that sought to understand and try to understand the signs of God at that moment, that tried to meet the challenge of God in this time and to find the words for today and tomorrow.  So, while the whole council moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of journalists did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith, but within the categories of the media of today, that is, outside of the faith and with different hermeneutics.  It was a hermeneutic of politics.  The media saw the Council as a political struggle, a struggle for power between different currents within the Church.  It was obvious that the media would take the side of whatever faction best suited their world.  There were those who sought a decentralization of the Church, power for the Bishops and then, through the Word for the ‘People of God’, the power of the people, the laity.  There was this triple issue: the power of the Pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops, and then the power of all... popular sovereignty.  Naturally they saw this as the part to b e approved, to promulgate and to help.  This was the case for the Liturgy: there was no interest in the Liturgy as an act of faith, but as something to be made understandable, similar to a community activity and something profane.  We know that there was a trend, which was also historically based, that said: ‘Sacredness is a pagan thing, possibly even from the Old Testament.  In the New Testament, the only important thing is that Christ died outside, that is, outside the gates, that is, in the secular world.’ Sacredness ended up as profanity even in worship: worship is not worship but an act that brings people together, a communal participation and therefore, participation as activity.  These translations, trivializing the idea of the Council, were virulent in the practice of implementing the Liturgical Reform, born in a vision of the Council outside of its own key vision of faith.  It was also in the matter of Scripture: Scripture is an historical book and should be treated historically and nothing else, and so on.

We know that this Council of the media was accessible to all.  So, being dominant and more efficient, this Council created many calamities, so many problems and so much misery in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed and the Liturgy was trivialised... and so the true Council struggled to materialize and to be realized.  The virtual Council was stronger than the real Council!  But, the real strength of the Council was present and slowly it has emerged and is becoming the real power which is also true reform and the true renewal of the Church.  It seems to me that, 50 years after the Council, we see how this virtual Council is breaking down and getting lost, and the true Council is emerging, with all its spiritual strength.

(Pope Benedict’s Last Great Master Class;  14/2/2013) 

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 2.        30 Days, March 1989, p.23.

 3.        Fr Bob Bedard, Blaming the Council, The Bread of Life,  January 2005.

 4.        Ibid.

 5.        Catholic Herald,  11/07/03, p.9.

 6.        30 Days, March 1989, p.23.

 7.        Michael Meilach ofm,  The Cord, September 1980.

 8.        W. Oddie, Blog 3/1/2013.

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10.        Henri de Lubac S.J., Teilhard de Chardin, Theology of Renewal, V.I. Herder of Herders,

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11.        Ibid, p.234.

12.        T. Dubay, Crisis, October 1989, p.12.

13.        Catholic World Report, December 1997.

14.        M. Geffin, Objections to Roman Catholicism, Constable, Louvain, 1967.

15.        Macaulay, Review of Von Ranke’s, Political History of the Popes, 1840.

16.        Crisis, February 1992, p.2.

17.        Dubay, loc. cit. P.12.

18.        Ibid, p.13.

19.        Questionable Answers. Tablet 5/6/93.

20.       TIME,  3/8/81, p.50.

21.        Pedro Arrupe S.J. on 12/12/67 Tablet 19/3/94, p.356.

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26.       Southern Cross, 12/12/93.

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28.       TIME, 3/8/81.

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44.       30 Days, March 1989, p.22.

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62.       Catholic World Report, August 1996.

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70.       Divine Office V.2.  p.29 and p.139.

71.        L. Vardey, Mother Theresa : A Simple Path, Rider 1995, p.22.

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77.       Southern Cross 31/10/2012, p.3.

78.       30 Days, March 1989, p.23.

79.       30 Days, September 1988, p.3.

80.       Koser, loc. cit., p.ix.

81.        Loc. Cit., p.8.

82.       Billy Graham, The Holy Spirit,  Nelson 1978, p.vii.