de Mattei's Lecture

Fr. Ray Blake's Blog ^ | July 11, 2015 | Fr. Ray Blake

[ebb tide]

I was sorry that I missed Roberto de Mattei's Lecture last night, it was sponsored by the LMS, and was a memorial lecture to honour Michael Davies and the title was 'From the Second Vatican Council to the Synod: The Teaching of Michael Davies'.

Fortunately Rorate have put it online, it is worth making the effort to read. If you need persuasion, here is just one little section to whet your appetite:

Reading M. Davies’ work can help us understand the present crisis. We are now faced with a Synod of Bishops on the Family that seems to be questioning the indissolubility of marriage and opening the door to homosexual couples. If Michael Davies were alive, he would perhaps see its origins in the abandonment of the original schema on Marriage and the Family at Vatican II, substituted by a few ambiguous passages in Gaudium et Spes. M. Davies individuated immediately the dangers lurking in GS on the inversion of the ends of marriage. Indeed, by placing procreation after conjugal love, all of Catholic morality was altered. Davies reports the Master General of the Dominicans, Cardinal Browne’s warning – during a conciliar session – he rose to his feet and said in a loud voice: “Caveatis, caveatis! If we accept this definition we are going against the whole tradition of the Church and we shall pervert the whole meaning of marriage”41.

If the first end of marriage is not procreation, it has its highest expression in conjugal love - but the love of the spouses comes from an act of the will and an act of the will can decree its end. If morality is not rooted in nature, but in the person, the relationship of the couple prevails over the objective good of the family. And if the primacy of inter-personal relations is established, this principle is condemned to extend to extra-marital relations and then, from heterosexual to homosexual relations.

According to M. Davies, the eternal enmity between the Augustinian City of God and the City of Man, appears to be extinct in GS. “While there are statements in GS which insist that the heavenly kingdom is still the primary goal of the Church, it is beyond dispute that the document displays a pervasive and obsessive preoccupation with the earthly Kingdom. If the amount of print devoted to the former and the latter is compared, the contrast is both startling and depressing. It is replete with the spirit of Integral Humanism and Sillonism”

[ebb tide]

Seems like more and more people, both religious and lay, are seeing VCII as no longer being a super-dogma that cannot be critiqued.