Posted on 10/05/2002 11:43:13 AM PDT by sinkspur
Few debates in contemporary Catholicism are more explosive than whether the present pontificate has “turned back the clock” on the Second Vatican Council. Liberals say yes almost as an article of faith, while conservatives assert an equally convinced no.
Stated as such, both responses are more ideological than analytical. Vatican II was a complex event that gave rise to differing, sometimes conflicting impulses, and evaluating the 23-year reign of John Paul II through its optic would require careful issue-by-issue study.
Yet as a matter of historical record, it is worth noting that some of the architects of this papacy have indeed pursued policies upon arrival in Rome that differ from those they advocated as theologians at Vatican II. Whether these reversals result from a more mature understanding of the council, changed historical circumstances, the tug of careerism, or some other force is not within the scope of this essay. But we can at least document a few instances of what has taken place.
To do so, I’ll take as an example Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His public record both during the council and as a curial official make comparisons especially clear.
Ratzinger came to Vatican II as the theological expert (peritus) of Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Germany. The two were part of the broad progressive majority. In the years afterward, Ratzinger became concerned with excesses he believed resulted from the council’s reformist spirit.
One can identify at least five issues on which there are discontinuities between the conciliar and the curial Ratzinger.
Collegiality
At the time of the council, Ratzinger believed the church was overly centralized. In a 1963 commentary on the first session, he described the emergence of “horizontal Catholicity” as one of its most important achievements, in which “the curia found a force to reckon with and a real partner in discussion.” He offered as the leading example control over liturgy by bishops’ conferences, “not by delegation of the Holy See, but by virtue of their own independent authority.”
In a 1990 series of lectures on ecclesiology to the bishops of Brazil, however, Ratzinger placed a strong accent on the “vertical Catholicity” he had earlier sought to correct. His exchanges with Cardinal Walter Kasper on the relationship between the universal and local churches reflect the same thinking. In practice, Ratzinger has not been an ally of “horizontal Catholicity.” He was a driving force, for example, in rejecting the lectionary, or collection of scripture readings for the Mass, approved by the U.S. bishops in 1991. He has generally been supportive of the crackdown on the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, a joint project of English-speaking episcopal conferences.
Bishops’ conferences
In the first volume of Concilium, a progressive theological journal founded after Vatican II, Ratzinger wrote: “Bishops’ conferences … seem to offer themselves today as the best means of concrete plurality in unity. They are also a legitimate form of the collegiate structure of the church.
“One not infrequently hears the opinion that the bishops’ conferences lack all theological basis and could not therefore act in a way that could be binding on an individual bishop,” Ratzinger writes, rejecting this argument. “Here again we have a case where a one-sided and unhistorical systematization breaks down.”
Yet as prefect, Ratzinger has advanced just this argument. The lack of theological standing was a cardinal point of the August 1998 document Apostolos Suos, which held that conferences cannot issue statements on doctrine or morality without either unanimity among its members or the prior approval of the Holy See. Ratzinger had been making this argument since 1983, when he brought a delegation of American bishops to Rome to discuss the second draft of the U.S. bishops’ letter on peace.
The synod of bishops
Paul VI launched the synod in 1967 to ensure regular participation by bishops in governance of the universal church. In 1965, Ratzinger saw the synod as a means of continuing the council: “If we may say that the synod is a permanent council in miniature -- its composition as well as its name justify this -- then its institution under these circumstances guarantees that the council will continue after its official end; it will from now on be part of the everyday life of the church.”
In his 1987 work Church, Ecumenism and Politics, however, Ratzinger struck a contradictory note: “It [the synod] advises the pope; it is not a small-scale council, and it is not a collegial organ of leadership for the universal church.” He argued that according to Lumen Gentium 22, the college of bishops can act with legal force only in an ecumenical council or by all bishops of the world acting in unity. The college cannot delegate authority, hence the synod cannot function as a “council in miniature.”
The Holy Office
Frings, the cardinal Ratzinger assisted, delivered one of the most famous speeches of Vatican II, penned in part by Ratzinger, on the role of the doctrinal agency, in those days called the Holy Office. Frings said its “methods and behaviors do not conform at all to the modern era, and are a cause of scandal to the world.” In 1968, Ratzinger signed a petition proposing reforms. They included: 1) a theologian should be able to have counsel of his or her own choice from the beginning of any investigation; 2) all relevant documents should be provided upon request; 3) the theologian under review should not be bound by secrecy; 4) any dispute should be referred to two professional theologians, one chosen by the person under review; 5) the International Theological Commission should represent the diversity of theological views in the church.
As prefect of the doctrinal congregation, Ratzinger has by and large not implemented these reforms. Investigations still unfold in the early stages without the defendant being informed or given the opportunity for counsel. Theologians are refused their case files. Secrecy is often imposed. The International Theological Commission, though encompassing diversity within a certain range, is not seen by many theologians as representative of the “schools” that exist today.
Eucharist
In a 1972 essay reflecting on the council, Ratzinger argued for allowing divorced and civilly remarried Catholics under some circumstances to receive the Eucharist. He cited St. Basil: “There it is stated that after a longer penance, Communion can be given to a digamus [someone living in a second marriage], without the suspension of the second marriage; this in confidence of God’s mercy who does not leave penance without an answer. … It seems that the granting of full communion, after a time of probation, is nothing less than just, and is fully in harmony with our ecclesiastical traditions.”
Yet in September 1994, in response to three German bishops who defended granting Communion under these circumstances, Ratzinger’s congregation upheld the traditional ban. “Authentic understanding and genuine mercy are never separated from the truth,” it held. Civilly remarried persons “find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive holy Communion as long as this situation persists.”
These five inconsistencies do not, by themselves, prove a rollback. Yet they may establish a burden of proof. It seems legitimate to ask Ratzinger, and those in the pontificate who share his views, if there is some deeper coherence underlying the incongruities, if they misunderstood the council, or if on certain points Vatican II and the reforming energies it unleashed were simply wrong. If the last option is the case, the interesting question becomes how to make theological sense of a council that erred in such important ways.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail address is jallen@natcath.org. His book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith was published in 2000 by Continuum
From JPII’s minority dissent from the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control (1966):
"If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XII's address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved."
I've never found the whole text online, but a good library will have it -- or else try the National Catholic Register archives, cuz they published the leak.
Oh...I just re-read your entire post.
JPII did indeed dissent from Paul VI's Papal Commission on Birth Control.
But so did Pope Paul VI.
The Papal Commission on Birth Control itself, in its majority report, recommended changing the Church's stance on contraception.
Pope Paul VI, as well as JPII at the time, stood firm in the traditional correct teaching that contraception is inherently evil.
Just read JPII's comments again, realizing that he is taking the Papal Commission on Birth Control itself to task for wrongly recommending that Paul VI change this teaching, as for example, all the protestants had already done.
In other words, this quote from JPII is a superb defense of the Church's position on contraception.
Wisdom often comes with age. Many honest liberals become extremely more orthodox as they get older and face judgement.
I found it odd that it has not appeared in any of the apologetics sites... there are no issues a well informed Catholic is afraid of.
If you read the quotation carefully, you can see that he is saying that a capitulation on the issue of birth control would be tantamount to surrender to the Protestants and would be an admission that the Holy Spirit was not protecting the Church.
There are rumors that John Paul I supported the decision of the Papal Commission, but my research has failed to turn up any substantiation of that rumor. It was reported in the same book which claimed JP I was murdered because he was about to expose the (very real) scandal in the Vatican Bank (which JP II did nothing about until the bank collapsed after Sindona was found hanging from Blackfriars' bridge).
I think there are something like three levels to the Vatican's take on sexuality/contraception/abortion, and folks confuse 'em a lot: Truth, Authority, and History. There's obviously a whopper of an argument about the Truth in this as in any big debate, but that's distinct from the ayatollah-you-so approach that the Church often takes to its Authority. (The Situation is another good example.) I posted somewhere on Amy's site that advocates for papal infallibility often forget that is has -- MUST have -- the defect of its virtue. That the Pope can be infallible on anything, necessarily weakens his collegial support on everything -- particularly on a tough call. Authority is its own enemy. That's why the history of the Vatican take on sexuality and fertility is so telling. For a threat on NFP, I explored it in some detail -- going all the back to Augustine and Gregory, I even read Papal encyclicals in 1906, 1930 as well as Humana Vitae. Like I said, I've never found the original text of the Majority Report online -- but that KW dissent is really telling. I don't think it's fraudulent. It is perfectly consistent with Vatican doctrine before, as well as after. And it's just plain wrong. Historians often object to 'retrojection', to evaluating some event or person in history as if they had a modern perspective or modern choices. So what the issue looked like in 1966 is different than how it looks now, particularly Roe v. Wade -- and and it is simply not accurateto find prophecy in what the Church did and said, because the fact is, it was doing and saying something DIFFERENT than it has come to since. NFP is the proof. The guy who invented the Pill was a devout Catholic, ya know. He believed that providing women (particularly in underdeveloped countries) with a means of marrying young (as they had always done) and yet not having large families, was a blessing. THAT -- not the pro-life argument devised 40 years later -- is what the Vatican objected to, based on the idea that the only moral purpose of sexuality is procreation. That's what the 1930 encyclical and all the speeches cited by KW's dissent was about. So when he referred to Authority, he meant exactly what he said.
If you read the quotation carefully, you can see that he is saying that a capitulation on the issue of birth control would be tantamount to surrender to the Protestants and would be an admission that the Holy Spirit was not protecting the Church.
Good summary, Max.
Another fine point, American Colleen, is that Papal Commission was simply an advisory group, and held no teaching authority. It was charged by Paul VI with reexamining the contraception issue, but its conclusions again were only advisory.
Paul VI wisely ignored their conclusions, and JPII backed him in doing so.
Thus the traditional infallible teaching was safeguarded by the acts of Paul VI and JPII at the time, despite the worldly temptation to cave to pressure on birth control coming from all side in and out of the Church.
It sounds like a real, cohesive, strong statement in support of Humanae Vitae, if you know its context, i.e., the Papal Commission on Birth Control was simply an advisory body with no teaching authority whatsoever. The Pope is infallible. Those dissenting on the 2000 year old teaching of Christianity condemning contraception were not.
I cannot see how this could be spun to impugn infallibility unless they are trying to claim the Papal Commission had some form of authority that it simply did not have.
The very act of assembling the commission called the Church's teaching into question, and Paul VI waited THREE YEARS after the commission released its conclusions to respond with Humanae Vitae.
That was a colossal mistake, but I suspect Paul VI was wrestling with his ultimate conclusion.
I think this guy is coming at it differently, unless I am reading his e-mails incorrectly. I believe he is asserting that Paul VI and JPII did not change the Church teaching on Birth control because it would have undermined the dogma of Papal Infallibility.
For context, this whole issue is over a debate about the validity of "Voice of the Faithful" - he is a supporter and I am not. He thinks they have a place in the Church but I contend they do not since they espouse and give aid and comfort to other dissenting groups like Corpus and CTA, et. al.
Mine too. Prof Janet Smith thought this was preposterous, and mentioned that Mother Teresa had been very happy with the elevation of JP I because she felt he was such a good orthodox candidate.
Personally, given the blatant anti-Catholic bias of the author of that book regarding JP I's death, I think his position was wishful thinking, projecting onto JP I his own agenda.
I agree with everything you said here, Sink. It makes the defense of HV more difficult.
Which is probably why he mentioned the 'Smoke of Satan'.
I also reread Garry Wills' take on the Humanae Vitae issue in the chapter dealing with same in "Papal Sins." It seems that my e-mail guy is on the same page with Wills. Maybe it is my reading of the book, but Wills seems to hold great distain for the papacy, I come away from the Humanae Vitae chapter feeling I need a bath.
Since we are going to engage in speculation as to Paul VI's motives, I will offer an alterative: A pope leftist enough in his personal views to denounce the United States at the United Nations, no less, for "racist genocide in Vietnam," and who had a track record of seeing no enemies to his left while cracking down on those to his right, was nonetheless a very conservative man throughout his life on matters sexual. In the 1930s, he had admonished young couples for the chaste exchange of kisses in public in Vatican City.
Horrified by the anti-Magisterial conclusions of John XXIII's ill-begotten commission and its naked defiance of the Magisterium and of the exact implications cited by American Colleen previously as to infallibility, having already thoroughly alienated Catholic conservatives by the ongoing carnival of ecclesiastical anarchy that was the essence of the 1960s, he would now have to alienate his liberal friends by taking away their new weapon against Catholicism.
Eventually, after years as a virtual prisoner of the Vatican and as a uniquely ineffective pope, Paul VI publicly stated his conclusion: "The smoke of Satan has entered the Church and surrounds our altars."
Fortunately, upon his death, the College of Cardinals, largely appointed by him and by John XXIII came riding to the rescue. Paul VI had decreed the exclusion from Conclave the grand cardinals over 80 years of age such as Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri (95 when he vigorously presided over Paul VI's funeral), Amleto Cardinal Cicognani (who as Pius XII's representative here was responsible for the last and brilliant generation of Roman Catholic leaders in the US like McIntyre and Spellman), and Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani. The three of them met the incoming cardinals at Rome's airport and successfully lobbied for Albino Cardinal Luciani (John Paul I) who was soon succeeded by Cardinal Karol Wojtlywa (John Paul II).
The National PseudoCatholic Register and John Allen pine away lusting for a return of their "good old days" in the hope that anarchy may be restored and in the further hope that the Roman Catholic Church may degenerate into "do your own thing" Unitarian Universalism with nicer churches (historic monuments of the bad old days of actual Faith) or splashier modernist edifices like Mahoney's massive new barn in Los Angeles. Too bad for NCR. Anarchy is a spent force. NCR may soon remember the good old days when JP II was pope and still let them dream while seeing to it that they and the gates of hell will not prevail.
Now, how to take all of these posts, absorb them, put them into my own words and send it to the e-mail guy who first gave me the JPII quote????
I think I'm just going to send him a link to this thread, it's much easier and maybe he'll join up.
Thanks again.
Since Luciani was a hard-liner as evidenced by his handling of massive clerical thievery in Venice as Patriarch and his summary dissolution of the Italian national Catholic youth organization for supporting a secular referendum legalizing divorce in Italy, it is no surprise that there is no dicumentation of support by him of such an infamita as birth control. There is a lot better chance that he was poisoned than that he would ever have supported birth control.
Liberals mistook his sunny smile for liberalism. He smiled his way through his first three years as Patriarch of Venice, telling children's stories, feeding pigeons, walking around Venice sunnily greeting the Venetians and all the while gathering the evidence to crack down on the larcenous substantial minority of the Venice clergy. His crackdown, when it came, was dramatic and implacable.
The modernists live in their own little ghetto, read each others' writings, attend each others' rebellious conferences, wallow in each others' counterfeit emotionalisms in lieu of the Faith, revise history as it suits them, ignore whatever conflicts with their idea of progress, promote Enneagrams, see the homosexual abuse of minors crisis not as an outrage to Holy Orders and to the victims but as a problem of hierarchical authority which habitually refuses to obey them (particularly at the level of the papacy.) In this country, the National Catholic Reporter is the typical transmission belt for the propagation of thier heresy of modernism, identified by Pope St. Pius X in 1907 as the synthesis of all heresies.
It helps to remember that he was once a Jesuit seminarian of the generation that destroyed the order. He apparently is made of less stern stuff than his contemporaries in the then afflicted Jebbie seminary and he left. The Church's gain became our society's loss. He went to work at National Review, no less, and became a brighter than average acolyte to Bill Buckley.
When Bill made an occasional error (he is in error about once per decade) in the 1960s, it was the infamous NR cover story: Mater Si, Magistra No (Mother Yes, Teacher No for the Novus Ordo set) in response to Pope John XXIII's social encyclical Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher for readers of the National PseudoCatholic Reporter). Bill was exercising himself as a fiscal conservative over his objections to being told that Catholics have obligations to the poor, which is certainly nothing new in the way of doctrine given much of the Sermon on the Mount by an even Higher Authority than John XXIII.
Ex-Jesuit seminarian Wills, who presumably did not leave in protest of his seminary being too liberal, nonetheless jumped into the fray rather immediately when Buckley was attacked by the Jesuit weekly liberal magazines America and Commonweal for (get this) insufficient obeisance to papal authority. They were right in their criticism but it was a little like being lectured on morals by the Arkansas Antichrist.
Wills rose to Buckley's defense in a full-fledged book telling John XXIII and his partisans to mind their own business on matters social and economic.
Eventually, probably to get a date with a liberal and a female at that, Wills abandoned any pretense of conservatism generally and defected to the left about the time that his (presumably liberal) wife agreed to marry him. First things first. Stunned by the spontaneity of it all, no doubt.
An odd choice of words.
BlackElk summarizes: The National PseudoCatholic Register and John Allen pine away lusting for a return of their "good old days" in the hope that anarchy may be restored and in the further hope that the Roman Catholic Church may degenerate into "do your own thing" Unitarian Universalism with nicer churches (historic monuments of the bad old days of actual Faith) or splashier modernist edifices like Mahoney's massive new barn in Los Angeles. Too bad for NCR. Anarchy is a spent force. NCR may soon remember the good old days when JP II was pope and still let them dream while seeing to it that they and the gates of hell will not prevail.
My comments: We have to remember that the agenda of John Allen and NCR is as BlackElk says; i.e., a degeneracy into do your own thing .... nicer churches. The Church is based on an episcopal structure and not on a kind of federation of national churches as NCR would like to believe.
It took NO research time at all to pull the following from The Ratzinger Report published in 1985. Typical of John Allen and NCR he tries to make a case against the leading theologian within the Church where no such inconsistency exists.
"The Council wanted specifically to strengthen the role and responsibility of bishops by resuming and completing the work ... of Vatican I, which was only able to concern itself with the pope. The Council Fathers had confirmed the latter's infallibility in the Magisterium when, as supreme Shepard and Teacher, he proclaims a teaching on faith or on morals as binding.
By so doing, a certain imbalance was created with some theologians who did not sufficiently stress that the episcopal college also enjoys the same "infallibility in the Magisterium", provided that the bisphops "preserve the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter.
The decisive new emphasis on the role of the bishops is in reality restrained or risks being smothered by the insertion of bishops into episcopal conferences that are ever more organized, often with burdensome bureaucratic structures. We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as will by Christ, that cannot be eliminated; they have only a practical, concrete function. No episcopal conference, as such, has a teaching mission; its documents have no weight of their own save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops.
The Catholic Church is based on the balance between the community and the person, in this case between the community of individual particular churches united in the universal Church and the person of the responsible head of the diocese. It happens ... that with some bishops there is a certain lack of a sense of individual responsibility, and the delegation of his inalienable powers as shepherd and teacher to the structures of the local conference leads to letting what should remain very personal lapse into anonymity.John Allen and NCR welcome this delegation of responsibility .
With regards Humana Vitae,I believe "the other force" is the Holy Spirit.I also think that the Holy Spirit has called back many Cardinals and other clergy as well as the laity.I would think that the Holy Spirit and frequent reality checks cause all but the most cold blooded or most cowardly or most self centered to return to Catholicism.
The opposition often uses ambiguous terms like force,spirit,zeitgeist,to lure the unsuspecting from God to other gods.
Several years ago at a "Recollection" morning,a priest told us about an incident that had been told to him by a Cardinal who was there and witnessed the event.It was a response to a question as to evidence that the Holy Spirit protected the Catholic Church.He related the following:
Pope Paul VI was under great pressure to release the Church's position on contraception.Both positions were written up as encyclicals,ready for the signature of the Pope to be issued when he made his decision.The encyclicals had been on his desk for quite some time.The pressure was increasing on the Pope to act. The majority position was being pushed by the powerful,monied and more worldly faction.Promises had been made to the laity and to powerful interest groups that were not Catholic that contraception would be approved.The decision weighed heavy on the Pope,he was exhausted,he was pale and he was showng the strain of the long battle being waged in this war with Modernity.One day in the presence of several Cardinals he said he was going into his private chapel and not coming out until he had received an answer.The next day he came out of the chapel,he looked healthy and serene and said the Holy Spirit had given him the answer and called for the minority encyclical and signed Humana Vitae and it was issued.
While I am neither the priest,who heard it from the Cardinal.who witnessed the event,I find it compelling because it was a response to a question that had nothing to do with Humana Vitae nor papal infallibility but instead was offerred as an example supporting the Holy Spirit's active role in guarding Christ's Church from error.
One question: why did the Pope agonize over a decision that seems to be so obvious? The fact that he dallied for three years after the Commission issued its report allowed the opposition to coalesce to the point where, when Humanae Vitae was issued, the arguments against it were primed and ready, and the encyclical was swallowed up in an almost-worldwide theological firestorm.
The next day he came out of the chapel,he looked healthy and serene and said the Holy Spirit had given him the answer and called for the minority encyclical and signed Humana Vitae and it was issued.
Since you relate a story by "someone who was there," let me relate that a similar person "who was there" said shortly after Humae Vitae was issued that Paul VI explicitly crossed out the phrase "this infallible decision" from the encyclical before issuing it.
The Holy Spirit is guaranteed to guide the decisions of the Holy Father, though not necessarily the timing.
I had learned that it was only when something had been proclaimed that had not been held in perpetuity as defined teaching or Truth,such as the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception,that the words "this is an infallible teaching of the Church" were used.
With respect to the timing,even Christ was tempted by the devil,I am sure that the temptation of the worldly on the Church which also encompasses the other worldly or supernatural was tremendous and the Pope is human.
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