The Extraordinary Form and the New Evangelization

by The Most Reverend Athanasius Schneider

Turning Our Gaze Towards Christ

In order to speak of new evangelization correctly, it is necessary first to turn our gaze towards Him Who is the true evangelizer, namely Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Word of God made Man. The Son of God came upon this earth to expiate and atone for the greatest sin, sin par excellence. And this sin, humanity's sin par excellence, consists in refusing to adore God and in refusing to keep the first place, the place of honor, for Him. This sin on the part of man consists in not paying attention to God, in no longer having a sense of the fittingness of things, or even a sense of the details pertaining to God and to the adoration that is His due, in not wanting to see God, and in not wanting to kneel before God.

For such an attitude, the incarnation of God is an embarrassment; as a result the real presence of God in the Eucharistic mystery is likewise and embarrassment; the centrality of the Eucharistic presence of God in our churches is an embarrassment. Indeed sinful man wants the center stage for himself, whether within the Church or during the Eucharistic celebration. He wants to be seen, to be noticed.

For this reason Jesus the Eucharist, God incarnate, present in the tabernacle under the Eucharistic form, is set aside. Even the representation of the Crucified One on the cross in the middle of the altar during the celebration facing the people is an embarrassment, for it might eclipse the priest's face. Therefore, the image of the Crucified One in the center of the altar as well as Jesus the Eucharist in the tabernacle, also in the center of the altar, are an embarrassment. Consequently, the cross and the tabernacle are moved to the side. During Mass, the congregation must be able to see the priest's face at all times, and he delights in placing himself literally at the center of the house of God. and if perchance Jesus, really present to us in the Most Holy Eucharist, is still left in His tabernacle in the middle of the altar because the Ministry of Historical Monuments -- even in an atheist regime -- has forbidden moving it for the conservation of artistic heritage, the priest, often throughout the entire Eucharistic celebration, does not scruple to turn his back to Him.

How often have good and faithful adorers of Christ cried out in their simplicity and humility: "God bless you, Ministry of Historical Monuments! At least you have left us Jesus in the center of our church."

The Mass is Intended to Give Glory to God, Not to Men

Only on the basis of adoring and glorifying God can the Church adequately proclaim the word of truth, that is, evangelize. Before the world ever heard Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh, preach and proclaim the Kingdom, He quietly adored for thirty years. This remains forever the law for the Church's life and action as well as for all evangelizers. "The way the liturgy is treated decides the fate of the Faith and of the Church," said Cardinal Ratzinger, our current Holy Father Benedict XVI. The Second Vatican Council intended to remaind the Church what reality and what action were to take the place in her life. This is the reason the first of the Concil's documents was dedicated to the liturgy. The Council gives us the following principles: in the Church, and therefore in the liturgy, the human must be oriented toward the divine and be subordinate to it; likewise the visible in relation to the invisible, action in relation to contemplation, the present in relation to the future city to which we aspire (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2). According to the teaching of Vatican II our earthly liturgy participates in a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy of the holy city of Jerusalem (ibid., 2).

Everything about the liturgy of the Holy Mass must therefore serve to express clearly the reality of Christ's sacrifice, namely the prayers of adoration, of thanksgiving, of expiation, and of petition that the eternal High Priest presented to His Father.

The rite and every detail of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass must center on glorifying and adoring God by insisting on the centrality of Christ's presence, whether in the sign and representation of the Crucified or in His Eucharistic presence in the tabernacle, and especially at the moment of the Consecration and of Holy Communion. The more this is respected and the less man takes center stage in the celebration, the less the celebration looks like a circle closed in on itself. Rather, it is opened out to Christ as in a procession advancing towards Him with the priest at its head; such a liturgical procession will more truly reflect the sacrifice of adoration of Christ crucified; the fruits deriving from God's glorification received into the souls of those in attendance will be richer; God will honor them more.

* * * * * * *

The rite and every detail of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass must center on glorifying and adoring God by insisting on the centrality of Christ's presence, whether in the sign and representation of the Crucified or in His Eucharistic presence in the tabernacle, and especially at the moment of the Consecration and of Holy Communion.

* * * * * * *

The more the priest and the faithful truthfully seek the glory of God rather than that of men in Eucharistic celebrations, and do not seek to receive glory from each other, the more God will honor them by granting that their souls may participate more intensely and fruitfully in the glory and honor of His divine life.

At present and in various places on earth there are many celebrations of the Holy Mass regarding which one might say, as an inversion of Psalm 113:9: "To us, O Lord, and to our name give glory." To such celebrations apply Jesus' words: "How can you believe, who receive glory one from another: and the glory which is from God alone, you do not seek?": (Jn 5:44).

The Six Principles of the Liturgical Reform

The Second Vatican Council put forward the following principles regarding a liturgical reform:

1. During the liturgical celebration, the human, the temporal, and action must be directed towards the divine, the eternal, and contemplation; the role of the former must be subordinated to the latter (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2).
2. During the liturgical celebration, the realization that the earthly liturgy participates in the heavenly liturgy will have to be encouraged (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 8).
3. There must be absolutely no innovation, therefore no new creation of liturgical rites, especially in the rite of the Mass, unless it is for a true and certain gain for the Church, and provided that all is done prudently and, if it is warranted, that new forms replace the existing ones organically (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 23).
4. The rite of Mass must be such that the sacred is more explicitly addressed (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 21).
5. Latin must be preserved in the liturgy, especially in Holy Mass (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 24 and 54).
6. Gregorian chant has pride of place in the liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 116).

The Council Fathers saw their reform proposals as the continuation of the reform of Saint Pius X (Sacrosanctum Concilium 112 and 117) and the servant of God Pius XII; indeed, in the liturgical constitution, Pius XII's Encyclical Mediator Dei is what is most often cited.

Among other things, Pope Pius XII left the Church an important principle of doctrine regarding the Holy Liturgy, namely the condemnation of what is called liturgical archeologism. Its proposals largely overlapped with those of the Jansenistic and Protestant-leaning synod of Pistoia (see Mediator Dei, 63-64). As a matter of fact they bring to mind Martin Luther's theological thinking.

For this reason, the Council of Trent had already condemned Protestant ideas, in particular the exaggerated emphasis on the notion of a banquet in the Eucharistic celebration to the detriment of its sacrificial character and the suppression of univocal signs of sacrality as an expression of the mystery of the liturgy (Council of Trent, session 22).

The Magisterium's doctrinal declarations on the liturgy, as in this case those of the Council of Trent and of the encyclical Mediator Dei and which are reflected in a centuries-old, or even millenia-old, liturgical praxis, these declarations, I say, form part of that element of Holy Tradition that one cannot abandon without incurring grave spiritual damage. Vatican II took up these doctrinal declarations on the liturgy, as one can see by reading the general principals of divine worship in the liturgical constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium.

As an example of a concrete error in the thought and praxis of liturgical action, Pope Pius XII cites the proposal to give to the altar the shape of a table (Mediator Dei 62). If already Pope Pius XII refused the table0shaped altar, one can imagine how much more he would have refused the proposal for a celebration around a table versus populum!

When Sacrosanctum Concilium 2 teaches that, in the liturgy, contemplation has the priority and that the entire celebration must be oriented to the heavenly mysteries (ibid. 2 and 8), it is faithfully echoing the following declaration of the Council of Trent: "And whereas such is the nature of man, that, without external helps, he cannot easily be raised to the meditation of divine things; therefore has holy Mother Church instituted certain rites, to wit that certain things be pronounced in the Mass in a low, and others in a louder, tone. She has likewise employed ceremonies, such as mystic benedictions, lights,incense, vestments, and many other things of this kind, derived from an apostolic discipline and tradition, whreby both the majesty of so great a sacrifice might be recommended, and the minds of the faithful be excited, by those visible signs of religion and piety, to the contemplation of those most sublime things which are hidden in this sacrifice" (Session 24, chapter 5).

The Church's magisterial teachings quoted above, especially Mediator Dei, were certainly recognized as fully valid by the Fathers of the Council. Therefore they must continue to be fully valid for all of the Church's children even today.

The Five Wounds of the Liturgical Mystical Body of Christ

In the letter to all the bishops of the Catholic Church that Benedict XVI sent with the July 7, 2007 Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, the Pope made the following important declaration: "In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too." In saying this, the Pope expressed the fundamental principle of the liturgy that the Council of Trent, Pope Pius XII, and the Second Vatican Council had taught.

* * * * * * *

The first and most obvious wound is the celebration of the Sacrifice of the Mass in which the priest celebrates with his face turned towards the faithful, especially during the Eucharistic prayer and the consecration, the highest and most sacred moment of the worship that is God's due.

* * * * * * *

Taking an unprejudiced and objective look at the liturgical practice of the overwhelming majority of churches throughout the Catholic world where the Ordinary Form of the roman rite is used, no one can honestly deny that the six aforementioned liturgical principles of Vatican II are never, or hardly ever, respected, despite the erroneous claim that such is the liturgical practice that Vatican II desired. There are a certain number of concrete aspects of the currently prevailing liturgical practice in the ordinary rite that represent a veritable rupture with a constant and millennium-old liturgical practice. By this I mean the five liturgical practices I shall mention shortly; they may be termed the five wounds of the liturgical mystical body of Christ. These are wounds, for they amount to a violent break with the past since they deemphasize the sacrificial character (which is actually the central and essential character of the Mass) and put forward the notion of banquet. All of this diminishes the exterior signs of divine adoration, for it brings out the heavenly and eternal dimension of the mystery to a far lesser degree.

Now the five wounds (except for the new Offertory prayers) are those that are not envisaged in the Ordinary Form of the rite of Mass but were brought into it through the practice of a deplorable fashion.

A) The first and most obvious wound is the celebration of the Sacrifice of the Mass in which the priest celebrates with his face turned towards the faithful, especially during the Eucharistic prayer and the consecration, the highest and most sacred moment of the worship that is God's due. This exterior form corresponds, by its very nature, more to the way in which one teaches a class or shares a meal. We are in a closed circle. And this form absolutely does not conform to the moment of the prayer, less yet to that of adoration. And yet Vatican II did not want this form by any means; nor has it ever been recommended by the Magisterium of the Popes since the Council. Pope Benedict worte in the preface of the first volume of his collected works: "The idea that the priest and the people in prayer must look at one another reciprocally was born only in the modern age and is completely foreign to ancient Christianity. In fact, the priest and the people do not address their prayer to one another, but together they address it to the one Lord. For this reason they look in the same direction in prayer: either towards the East as the cosmic symbol of the Lord's return, or where this is not possible, towards an image of Christ in the apse, toward a cross, or simply upwards."

The form of celebration in which all turn their gaze in the same direction (conversi ad orientem, ad Crucem, ad Dominum) is even mentioned in the rubrics of the new rite of the Mass (see Ordo Missae, 25, 133, 134). The so-called versus populum celebration certainly does not correspond to the idea of the Holy Liturgy as mentioned in the declaration of Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2 and 8.

B) The second wound is communion in the hand, which is now spread nearly throughout the entire world. Not only was this manner of receiving communion in now way mentioned by the Vatican II Council Fathers, but it was in fact introduced by a certain number of bishops in disobedience to the Holy See and in spite of the negative majority vote by bishops in 1968. Pope Paul VI legitimized it only later, reluctantly, and under specific conditions.

Pope Benedict XVI, since Corpus Christi 2008, distributes Communion to the faithful kneeling and on their tongue only, both in Rome and also in all the local churches he visits. He thus is showing the entire Church a clear example of practical Magisterium in a liturgical manner. Since the qualified majority of the bishops refused Communion in the hand as something harmful three years after the Council, how much more the Council Fathers would have done so!

C) The third would is the new Offertory prayers. They are an entirely new creation and had never been used in the Church. They express not so much the mystery of the sacrifice of the Cross as the event of a banquet; thus they recall the prayers of the Jewish Sabbath meal. In the more than thousand-year tradition of the Church in both East and West, the Offertory prayers have always been expressedly oriented to the mystery of the sacrifice of the Cross (see, e.g. Paul Tirot, Histoire des prières d’offertoire dans la liturgie romaine du VIIème au XVIème siècle [Rome, 1985]). There is no doubt that such an absolutely new creation contradicts the clear formulation of Vatican II that states: “Innovationes ne fiant . . . novae formae ex formis iam exstantibus organice crescant” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 23).

D) The fourth wound is the total disappearance of Latin in the huge majority of Eucharistic celebrations in the Ordinary Form in all Catholic countries. This is a direct infraction against the decisions of Vatican II.

E) The fifth wound is the exercise of the liturgical services of lector and acolyte by women as well as the exercise of these same services in lay clothing while entering into the choir during Holy Mass directly from the space reserved to the faithful. This custom has never existed in the Church, or at least has never been welcome. It confers to the celebration of the Catholic Mass the exterior character of informality, the character and style of a rather profane assembly. The second council of Nicaea, already in 787, forbad such practices when it lay down the following canon: “If someone is not ordained, it is not permitted for him to do the reading from the ambo during the holy liturgy“ (can. 14). This norm has been constantly followed in the Church. Only subdeacons and lectors were allowed to give the reading during the liturgy of the Mass. If lectors and acolytes are missing, men or boys in liturgical vestments may do so, not women, since the male sex symbolically represents the last link to minor orders from the point of view of the non-sacramental ordination of lectors and acolytes.

The texts of Vatican II never mention the suppression of the minor orders and of the subdiaconate or the introduction of new ministries. In Sacrosanctum Concilium no. 28, the Council distinguishes minister from fidelis during the liturgical celebration, and it stipulates that each may do only what pertains to him by the nature of the liturgy. Number 29 mentions the ministrantes, that is the altar servers who have not been ordained. In contrast to them, there are, in keeping with the juridical terms in use at that time, the ministri, that is to say those who have received an order, be it major or minor.


V –The Motu Proprio: putting an end to rupture in the liturgy In the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI stipulates that the two forms of the Roman rite are to be regarded and treated with the same respect, because the Church remains the same before and after the Council. In the letter accompanying the Motu Proprio, the pope wishes the two forms to enrich each other mutually. Furthermore he wishes that the new form “be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage.”

* * * * * * *

Four of the liturgical wounds, or unfortunate practices (celebration versus populum, communion in the hand, total abandonment of Latin and of Gregorian chant, and intervention of women for the service of lectorship and of acolyte), have in and of themselves nothing to do with the Ordinary Form of the Mass and moreover are in contradiction with the liturgical principles of Vatican II.

* * * * * * *

Four of the liturgical wounds, or unfortunate practices (celebration versus populum, communion in the hand, total abandonment of Latin and of Gregorian chant, and intervention of women for the service of lectorship and of acolyte), have in and of themselves nothing to do with the Ordinary Form of the Mass and moreover are in contradiction with the liturgical principles of Vatican II. If an end were put to these practices, we would get back to the true teaching of Vatican II. And then, the two forms of the Roman rite would come considerable closer so that, at least outwardly, there would be no rupture to speak of between them and, therefore, no rupture between the Church before and after the Council either.

As concerns the new Offertory prayers, it would be desirable for the Holy See to replace them with the corresponding prayers of the extraordinary form, or at least to allow for the use of the latter ad libitum. In this way the rupture between the two forms would be avoided not only externally but also internally. Rupture in the liturgy is precisely what the Council Fathers did not what. The Council’s minutes attest to this, because throughout the two thousand years of the liturgy’s history, there has never been a liturgical rupture and, therefore, there never can be. On the other hand there must be continuity, just as it is fitting for the Magisterium to be in continuity.

The five wounds of the Church’s liturgical body I have mentioned are crying out for healing. They represent a rupture that one may compare to the exile in Avignon. The situation of so sharp a break in an expression of the Church’s life is far from unimportant—back then the absence of the popes from Rome, today the visible break between the liturgy before and after the Council. This situation indeed cries out for healing.

For this reason we need new saints today, one or several Saint Catherines of Sienna. We need the vox populi fidelis demanding the suppression of this liturgical rupture. The tragedy in all of this is that, today as back in the time of the Avignon exile, a great majority of the clergy, especially in its higher ranks, is content with this rupture.

* * * * * * *

The five wounds of the Church’s liturgical body I have mentioned are crying out for healing. They represent a rupture that one may compare to the exile in Avignon.

* * * * * * *

Before we can expect efficacious and lasting fruits from the new evangelization, a process of conversion must get under way within the Church. How can we call others to convert while, among those doing the calling, no convincing conversion towards God has yet occurred, internally or externally? The sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrifice of adoration of Christ, the greatest mystery of the Faith, the most sublime act of adoration is celebrated in a closed circle where people are looking at each other.

What is missing is conversio ad Dominum. It is necessary, even externally and physically. Since in the liturgy Christ is treated as though he were not God, and he is not given clear exterior signs of the adoration that is due to God alone because the faithful receive Holy Communion standing and, to boot, take it into their hands like any other food, grasping it with their fingers and placing it into their mouths themselves. There is here a sort of Eucharistic Arianism or Semi-Arianism.

One of the necessary conditions for a fruitful new evangelization would be the witness of the entire Church in the public liturgical worship. It would have to observe at least these two aspects of Divine Worship:

1. Let the Holy Mass be celebrated the world over, even in the ordinary form, in an internal and therefore necessarily also external conversio ad Dominum.
   
   
2. Let the faithful bend the knee before Christ at the time of Holy Communion, as Saint Paul demands when he mentions the name and person of Christ (see Phil 2:10), and let them receive Him with the greatest love and the greatest respect possible, as befits Him as true God.

Thank God, Benedict XVI has taken two concrete measures to begin the process of a return from the liturgical Avignon exile, to wit the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum and the reintroduction of the traditional Communion rite.

There still is need for many prayers and perhaps for a new Saint Catherine of Sienna for the other steps to be taken to heal the five wounds on the Church’s liturgical and mystical body and for God to be venerated in the liturgy with that love, that respect, that sense of the sublime that have always been the hallmark of the Church and of her teaching, especially in the Council of Trent, Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei, Vatican II in its Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium and Pope Benedict XVI in his theology of the liturgy, in his liturgical magisterium, and in the Motu Proprio mentioned above.

No one can evangelize unless he has first adored, or better yet unless he adores constantly and gives God, Christ the Eucharist, true priority in his way of celebrating and in all of his life. Indeed, to quote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger: “It is in the treatment of the liturgy that the fate of the Faith and of the Church is decided.” +

_______________________________________________________________________
Bishop Schneider is auxiliary bishop of the archidiocese of Saint Mary of Astana and Secretary of the Kazakhstan Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is the author of the celebrated volume, Dominus Est – It Is the Lord! Reflections of a Bishop of Central Asia on Holy Communion,published by Newman House Press, and was a keynote speaker at the Call to Holiness conference in Metro Detroit in 2009.

The present article, "The Extraordinary Form and the New Evangelization," was first presented on January 15, 2012, as the keynote address at the fourth meeting of the Parisian association, Réunicatho, which came into being shortly after the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. We here present the unabridged translation of the keynote address given by the conference's guest of honor, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, as it was first published in the Paix Liturgique Newsletter 16 of March 2012 and subsequently on the Paix Liturgique website under the title, "Bishop Schneider and the Liturgy: Milestones for the Third Millennium." The article also appears in the Summer, 2012, issue Latin Mass magazine, pp. 6-10.

Marini's Conciliarist Manifesto

[The views expressed in the following article are solely the responsibility of its author and are not necessarily shared by the editor of this site.]


Peter A. Kwasniewski

“Just before sunrise, the wind got up. It was a vile, stubborn wind ...”

—Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea¹

As a historian phenomenon, “conciliarism” refers to the erroneous view that a general council of the Church is superior to the Pope in matters of faith and morals — that a Pope can be trumped, so to speak, by all the bishops assembled. This heresy was dealt a series of blows throughout the second millenium of Christianity, culminating in the double coup de grace of a pair of dogmatic constitutions on the Church: Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus and Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium. As those who have studied the latter document know, section 25 of Lumen Gentium contains the clearest, most extensive teaching ever given concerning the unique, supreme, direct authority of the Pope over the entire Church and all her members, including the bishops who must remain in union with him in order to remain truly Catholic.²

In the past forty years, however, a new form of conciliarism has arisen, one harder to define with precision and far more influential: the view that Vatican II, all by itself, was a Council that redefined the Church and her theology from top to bottom. For historians of the influential “Bologna school,” the Council gave birth to a new Church, ushered in a new age, cleared away ages of debris and decadence, proclaimed at last an ecumenical Gospel that sought out the world and passionately embraced it. While the falsity of such a bald statement may cause a wry smile, it is a sad fact that this peculiar brand of conciliarism has been the main force at work in the wreckage of the sacred liturgy for the past forty years. So much so, indeed, that a new “Great Schism” appeared in the twentieth century: a schism between a self-styled modern Church and the Church of Tradition. This virtual schism, like the doctrinal rupture and rampant liturgical abuses that are the hallmarks of its proponents, is far worse than any internal crisis the Church has ever faced before, outstripping in combined ignorance, error, and contempt even the horrors of the Protestant revolt.

* * * * * * * *
It is a sad fact that this peculiar brand of conciliarism has been the main force at work in the wreckage of the sacred liturgy for the past forty years. So much so, indeed, that a new “Great Schism” appeared in the twentieth century

* * * * * * *
As students of Chuch history know, the Holy Spirit does not long allow the Church to be storm-tossed and in danger of shipwreck. All the hard-won gains of the aging old guard—religious liberalism, laicism, secularism, feminism, soft modernism, horizontalism, relativism, and so forth, a whole litany of -isms that have replaced the Litany of Saints as the standard and measure of Catholic life today—are now being called into question by a new generation of believers and, ironically perhaps, by the elderly Pope who was a major force at the very Council whose spirit is claimed to be embodied in the new order of Mass and the new style of worship it promotes. Those who follow the Catholic media can see it daily: the graying liberals sound outraged, panicked, desperate. The more intelligent among them must surely know that the sun is beginning to go down on their long-reigning agenda.

Standing tall and unrepentant in the ranks of the rupturists is the retired papal M.C. for John Paul II, Archbishop Piero Marini, who was unceremoniously replaced at Pope Benedict XVI’s behest by the infinitely more competent and traditional Monsignor Guido Marini (no relation), a model M.C. if ever there was one. For the remainder of this article, “Marini” will always refer to the bishop plagued with a futuristic agenda and no future.
Back in 2007, Marini published a book that made quite a splash. A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal contains little to surprise those who are already familiar with the standard (“Bologna”) history of the Council and the divinely inspired reforms attributed to it. Anyone who has dared to dip into Bugnini’s disturbing memoirs will find Marini’s book not terribly original. It comes across rather as the last gasp of a dying cause, a kind of “rage against the dying of the light” from an energetic retiree. At a press conference in England, Marini portrayed in livid terms an ongoing battle between “conservation and progress,” and “the center and the periphery.” He wanted his book to sound “an invitation to look to the future, to take up with enthusiasm the path traced by the council.” How’s that for tendentious? We—the Church of the ages—are the periphery? I believe it was Chesterton who said that Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It is the soft modernist faction of the Council that are the periphery, with their loud minority opinion.

Benedict XVI has been the only pope since Blessed John XXIII who seems to have understood with crystalline clarity that Vatican II can have been a legitimate council only if it was intended to be, and is continually received as being, in continuity with the entire Tradition that preceded it. “The path traced by the Council” is, de facto and de iure, the path traced by Tradition—or it is irrelevant, not to say worse. The speech Pope Benedict delivered to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2006 was a beautifully clear indicator of the mind of Holy Mother Church: the Council is to be received within a hermeneutic of continuity, not a hermeneutic of rupture and discontinuity.
Journalist John Allen summarizes Marini’s identification of historical factors that paved the way for the Consilium’s triumph. First, “the presence of the council fathers in Rome during the first two years of implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II’s constitution on liturgy. The bishops themselves, [Marini] said, were ‘the first guarantors of reform.’” How easily the victors rewrite history! Many who were present at and involved in the Council have testified that the bishops had no idea they were about to witness the wholesale dismantling and reconstruction of the Roman Rite. Archimandrite Boniface Luykx (1915–2004) frequently noted that not a single bishop at the Council believed that Latin would be abolished, in practice, from the celebration of the Mass, that the priest would face the people, or that the prayers would be notably altered. In a moment of honesty, could Marini admit that Sacrosanctum Concilium did NOT ASK FOR most of the changes that were implemented?

* * * * * * *
Not a single bishop at the Council believed that Latin would be abolished, in practice, from the celebration of the Mass, that the priest would face the people, or that the prayers would be notably altered.

* * * * * * *
The second factor in the Consilium’s success, according to Marini: “The personal support of Pope Paul VI.” Alas, this is no relevation; it is but one more reason to hold this beleaguered pontiff of modernist sympathies in suspicion. People often rush to Paul VI’s defense by pointing out his heroically countercultural defense of chastity and the natural law in Humanae Vitae. We might be in danger of damning with faint praise. Humanae Vitae may seem bizarrely backwards or startlingly revolutionary to a world of hedonist nitwits, but any Catholic with an instinctive attachment to healthy sexuality, a modicum of religious education, and a morally sound outlook on family life would not for a moment be tempted by something as disgustingly unnatural as artificial contraception, nor would he or she register any surprise about what the Church had always taught and will always teach.

Let us move on to Marini’s third factor: “The rapid emergence of a network of ‘competent scholars,’ led by Lercaro and Bugnini.” Do I sense what the logicians call a petitio principii—a begging of the question? Competent by whose definition? Many of the fashionable scholarly theories of the mid-century have long since been discredited, even ridiculed, by liturgists and scholars whose first job is not grinding axes but understanding the history of Western liturgy. The business about how the Pope historically celebrated versus populum in St. Peter’s basilica was one of the main myths that drove the novelty of the priest’s turning his back to Christ, the symbolic East. We now know, thanks to better studies, that the Pope and the people faced eastwards at the most solemn part of the Mass, so important was their unanimous orientation felt to be.³

As the old guard present at Vatican II passes away year by year, Marini pleads that “it is important for the church to retain and renew the spirit that gave rise to the liturgical movement, and that inspired the council fathers to approve the constitution on the liturgy as the first fruit of that great grace of the 20th century which was the Second Vatican Council.” Hmm. The “spirit” behind the liturgical movement—is that anything like the particolored “spirit of Vatican II”? What about the origins of the liturgical movement among people who deeply and dearly loved the Church’s traditional liturgy and would have been disgusted by the superficial (if not sacrilegious) hootenanny that often replaced it? I can’t help thinking of a funny quotation by British Dominican Herbert McCabe, no traditionalist he, who nonetheless points out with brutal honesty:

There are satisfying experiences that are immediately satisfying, like drinking good Irish whiskey, but there are other satisfactions that occur only over long periods of time, like having a decently-furnished room. . . . If you are deprived of a decent liturgy for a fairly long period of time you discover an important gap in your emotional life. I might as well say at this point that I think there is a mistaken tendency, more especially in the United States but to some extent here [in England], to design the liturgy for too immediate a satisfaction. I have been with the “underground” groups in the American Church who do not really feel they have celebrated a Eucharist unless they get some kind of immediate experience of personal warmth and enhanced sensitivity. I think the liturgies designed by these people are very frequently in bad taste. I agree with those critics who find the Missa Normativa a little dull, except that I do not think it is altogether a criticism. A room furnished in good taste is a little dull compared to one covered in psychedelic posters saying “Love is Love” and “Mary, the ripest tomato of them all.”⁴

At the same press conference, Marini pontificated: “The goal of the liturgy is none other than the goal of the church, and the future of the liturgy is the future of Christianity and Christian life.” Even the devil quotes Scripture, and Balaam’s ass had intelligent counsel to offer. The future of the liturgy, in reality, is nothing other than, and nothing less than, the Mass of the Ages, the traditional Roman Rite that had organically developed for almost 2000 years until its violent deformation at the hands of Bugnini & Company.


The end of Mass at Rocafort by Jose Benlliure Ortiz

Our Lord gave the Mass to the Church for all her people, especially for the simple and the childlike. It is precisely such lowly laity who are not sophisticated enough to judge on the basis of theories and hypotheses, but who judge by what they see and hear—“O taste and see how gracious the Lord is...”

* * * * * * *
Anyone with good sense can see that the sudden virtual suppression of huge parts of Catholic liturgical tradition can only have had a profoundly unsettling, disorienting, and destabilizing effect on the Church as a whole. The apparent “success” of the reform has been belied by the bitter problems of doctrine and morals that have plagued the Church in the past four decades, centering on a loss of priestly identity, a drastic decline in priestly vocations, and an almost universal ignorance of the Faith and of the Sacred. The glamorous meetings of ICELated conspirators conveniently fail to mention the countless Catholics who felt betrayed, alienated, and even scandalized by the drastic changes that occurred as if overnight. I was talking to a neighbor one day—someone I’d gotten to know from seeing him so often around town—and when he found out that I taught for the Catholic College, he volunteered that he was a fallen-away Catholic who stopped going to Mass back in the seventies. “I went one Sunday and it was Hallelujah this and Hallelujah that, and I said to myself: What the hell is all this? It sure isn’t Mass!” Years ago, another friend told me a similar story. He said when the drums and guitars invaded the sanctuary, practically overnight, and routed the quiet low Mass he had grown up with, he felt dismayed, betrayed, assaulted, actually sick to his stomach. He stopped going to Mass for years, and nearly lost his faith entirely. Fortunately, he was one of those who, thanks be to God, returned to the Church after the indult Masses began.

Our Lord gave the Mass to the Church for all her people, especially for the simple and the childlike. It is precisely such lowly laity who are not sophisticated enough to judge on the basis of theories and hypotheses, but who judge by what they see and hear—“O taste and see how gracious the Lord is...” And judging by what they saw and heard, many came to the conclusion that the Church had either gone bonkers or had “come of age” and surrendered to secularism. In either case, it was time to stop going to Church. Rather than rejoicing in a botched reform conducted with all the finesse of bulldozers, one ought to feel righteous indignation about the high and mighty doings of the liturgical elite in the heady days of the late sixties and beyond, as they indulged in their liturgical fantasies while carelessly trampling on the hearts and minds of innumerable ordinary Catholics who loved the beauty and dignity of the Church’s worship as they knew it.

* * * * * * *
Anyone with good sense can see that the sudden virtual suppression of huge parts of Catholic liturgical tradition can only have had a profoundly unsettling, disorienting, and destabilizing effect on the Church as a whole.

* * * * * * *
Marini’s talk in London was full of that peculiar messianism characteristic of Vatican II nostalgics. Here is how it ended: “The Holy Spirit that inspired the liturgical movement and the council fathers still encircles us like a sacred cloud, and guides us like a column of fire,” offering “beauty ever new” as well as “joy and hope.” That’s what they call rhetoric, folks, but not in the most flattering sense of the word. If it was indeed the Holy Spirit and not the Zeitgeist or something more infernal yet, then the entire way we receive and rejoice in the Council and in the liturgical movement will of necessity exemplify the hermeneutic of continuity: the Council is to be interpreted in line with and in light of the great Tradition of Catholic theology and worship. It will not, pace Marini, cleave to the “hermeneutic of rupture,” whereby the Council would signify a decisive change of course that requires systematically deconstructing what came before and terrorizing those who adhere to it.

Let us remind ourselves again and again that Sacrosanctum Concilium expressly says that “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing” (§23). To those who are familiar with the wonderfully durable and ineffably beautiful preconciliar sacramental rites, it would seem obvious that few, if any, changes could have been defensible according to this strict criterion of “genuine good.” It would be like looking into a chest filled with treasures fashioned of precious metals and jewels, and saying: “Let’s get rid of anything in here that’s worthless.” Good luck finding the iron and bronze brooches. But the Consilium came along and—to the horror of orthodox Catholics, the delight of far-seeing modernists, and the surprise of just about everyone—discovered that the rites of the Roman Church were thoroughly defective and in need of a massive overhaul. An overhaul, in fact, that would culminate, decades later, in a pathetic banalization of the very rite of exorcism, as if we could pull the wool over Old Scratch’s intellectual eyes. According to many exorcists, the new rite does not even work very well; it is certainly much less effective than the old. A personal friend of mine, an exorcist for a major diocese, told me that water blessed by the old solemn formula is considerably more effective against demons than water blessed with newer formulas. In a way, if one may compare great things to small, Church leaders made the same mistake as Coca-Cola did, but lacked the marketing brains to realize it and bring back the original recipe. It seems that hierarchical office does not bring with it a charism of factual analysis.

The Consilium found that the Tradition was defective and the People of God were crying out for a new Mass, a new Liturgy of Hours, new blessings, new everything. This sounds like special pleading. Who are we to trust: the Tradition of the Church, which embodies the faith, hope, and love of countless believers and pastors over many centuries, or the Experts whose theories embody (at best) the ephemeral wisdom of academia, here today and gone tomorrow? Why do the Experts think that they know better than the common man—or, for that matter, than the Common Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, who is always on the common man’s side? The whole tenor of the Consilium ascendancy, as of Marini’s book, smacks of the spirit of Protestantism: we, a select few enlightened by the Spirit of God, will choose what is the best way forward in Catholic worship.

In any case, one thing is certain: we will see a lot of this kind of nostalgic resistance from the aging conciliarists; it will be a hallmark of at least the next ten years, and it will become more and more acerbic, accompanied by an increase in clandestine acts of desperation. They accuse the traditionalists of wallowing in nostalgia, but as brilliant a light as Fr. Richard McBrien finds himself caught short trying to explain how young Catholics who never grew up with the Latin Mass are flocking to it, loving it, and passing it on to their children. A “nostalgia” for what one could never have remembered is positively indecent and categorically illogical! (I was born in 1971, after Pope Paul VI had safely earned his place in the ranks of the worst popes of history, so I can add fuel to McBrien’s ire.) In an interview for the National Catholic Reporter, Marini memorably compared the traditional nostalgics with the carnal Jews who, having been liberated from the bondage of Pharaoh and his evil empire, longed for the fleshpots of Egypt:

First of all, it’s important that I spoke about a path [of liturgical reform], one that I believe is irreversible. I often think about the journey of the ancient Israelites in the Old Testament. It was a difficult journey, and sometimes the people became nostalgic for the past, for the onions and the melons of Egypt and so on. In other words, sometimes they wanted to go back. But the historical journey of the church is one which, by necessity, has to move forward.

Marini is not quite finished, however, with his penetrating analysis. He is puzzled that so many young people are drawn to the older liturgical forms—how can this be? He shares his reasoning process with us:

I see a certain nostalgia for the past. What concerns me in particular is that this nostalgia seems especially strong among some young priests. How is it possible to be nostalgic for an era they didn’t experience? . . . I’m always surprised to see young people who feel this nostalgia for something they never lived with. “Nostalgia for what?,” I find myself asking.

In reality, now that we are finally beginning to see genuine liturgical renewal thanks to Summorum Pontificum and the “reform of the reform” movement, the nostalgia is all on the side of the wrinkled cheerleaders with their placards of “Man has come of age; so should the Mass.” They are gazing wistfully back to the sixties while younger and wiser Catholics are thanking God that we’ve made tracks away from that benighted time of false hopes and Teilhardian illusions. Or better, the younger Catholics who take their faith seriously are doing just that: taking it seriously. Taking it as given, not as manufactured; as timeless, not as up-to-date. The Mass is not an experiment, a proving ground for academic theories, a do-it-yourself when ordained ministers run dry. It is the one and only Sacrifice of Calvary made present in our midst, in a hallowed form we receive from our forebears, bearing not only its own sanctifying reality, but also the sanctified history of the communion of saints. The reaction of any sane believer is to fall to his knees in adoration, along with generations of his fathers and—may God in His mercy grant it—generations of his children to come.

* * * * * * *
The Mass is not an experiment, a proving ground for academic theories, a do-it-yourself when ordained ministers run dry. It is the one and only Sacrifice of Calvary made present in our midst, in a hallowed form we receive from our forebears, bearing not only its own sanctifying reality, but also the sanctified history of the communion of saints.

* * * * * * *
In my years of teaching undergraduate and graduate theology, I have seen how young people who are serious about their faith flock to the traditional Mass, with little prompting or explanation required, and how they continue to attend it throughout their adult lives, eventually introducing their children to it. I have seen the spectacle of college students who, because they grew up in a parish or chapel run by the Fraternity of St. Peter, have never attended a Novus Ordo Mass, and who therefore need it to be explained to them. I was one of those young people who flocked to the (once-forbidden) “old Mass,” and as the years pass, my love for it only grows deeper and stronger. It has nothing to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia would be impossible for people who existed only in God’s mind, not on earth, when Paul VI made his fateful decision to promulgate the Novus Ordo Missae. It has to do with something much more fundamental than nostalgia: the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. Every soul is created by God to resonate with these transcendentals. We yearn for their presence in a modern world hell-bent on falsity, evil, and ugliness. And the traditional Mass, the crown of all the sacred rites and ceremonies of our Faith, powerfully contains and expresses them. What a gift! And what a privilege is ours to see this gift once more given and received!+

Notes

1. Trans. Kingsley Hart (n.p.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), 88. [back]


2. The same section 25 redresses an imbalance from Vatican I: while Pastor Aeternus seemed to focus on infallible ex cathedra pronouncements, i.e., what could be called the extraordinary Magisterium, Lumen Gentium broadened its consideration to include, and to emphasize, the authoritative nature of the Pope’s ordinary Magisterium—a lesson the vast majority of Catholics, both liberal and conservative, have still not accepted. [back]


3. For more on this, see Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, and Lang, Turning Towards the Lord. [back]


4. Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York/London: Continuum, 2005), 215-6. [back]

[Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski is Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming. The present article, "Marini's conciliarist Manifesto," was originally published in The Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 6-10, and is reprinted here by kind permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060, and the author.]

Dignitatis Humanae

The Interpretive Principles

by Peter A. Kwasniewski


In the history of the Church no magisterial document has generated as much controversy and contradiction among its interpreters as the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae. By some it has been exalted as the Council's choicest fruit, by others contemned as a flagrant departure from preconciliar teaching. It has been reviewed, analyzed, critiqued, and defended in countless books and articles.

What business is it of mine, then, to dare to add another essay to this ever-growing pile? The answer is this. Most treatments begin from such an entrenched predisposition of favoritism or antagonism that they fail to come to grips with perennially valid interpretive or hermeneutical principles that a reader must bring to the document if it to be read as a magisterial text, that is, one that must be in harmony with the Catholic tradition rather than in opposition to it (whether the rupture be rejoiced in or lamented). Put differently, what is lacking is a clear introduction to the method of interpretation of this conciliar document. My goal, therefore, is both modest and ambitious. I do not attempt a detailed interpretation; thus for modesty. But I do offer a perspective according to which Dignitatis Humanae can, without intellectual contortions, be seen by anyone as a logical extension of the preconciliar Magisterium on the question of a man's right to pursue the truth in freedom; thus for ambition.

Preambles to magisterial interpretation

We must begin with certain preambles without which any attempt to understand an ecclesiastical document will falter.

1. The fundamental principle of all magisterial interpretation, especially when it comes to the Second Vatican Council, is what Pope Benedict has called a "hermeneutic of continuity," in contrast to a "hermeneutic of rupture."¹ One always grants the benefit of the doubt, so to speak, to any substantive doctrinal assertion in a document that is promulgated by legitimate authority -- that is, one presumes its continuity with the preceding tradition even where this is not apparent, or where the opposite seems apparent. One then endeavors to understand the later teaching in continuity with preceding tradition, as part of a larger tradition that encompasses it, and in light of analogous, parallel, or subsequent texts which flesh out the meaning. No text is to be read in a vacuum, since there is a tradition that serves as context; no merely circumstantial evidence (e.g., what so-and-so, when interviewed, says is the meaning of a certain statement) is to be taken as definitive; preference is given to clearer authoritative expressions of doctrine, earlier or later.

2. The Church, in the person of her legitimate pastors, is the living agent of interpreting her own Magisterium. There is no detached, "scientific" perspective outside of her, on the basis of which the Magisterium can be determined apart from its own self-elucidation. However, as Pope Benedict has also stressed, the Church is a servant of revelation and in no way its author of final measure; the Holy Spirit abiding in the Church is the font of all authentic interpretation. This opens up the real possibility of greater or lesser fidelity, clarity, and competence on the part of pastors, even the Supreme Pastor. While error in faith and morals is categorically excluded, no such guarantee of Divine assistance extends to inappropriate silence or omission, ambiguity or vagueness, insufficient elaboration, and so forth. Because the Church's understanding of her teaching is always expressed at the specific historical moments with specific intellectual resources, an ongoing process of reflection and clarification will be desirable, even unavoidable. Finally, as we known, individual Bishops can falter and require correction -- and even the Pope, in regard to prudential applications or personal opinions.²

3. While it does not address every difficulty that interpreters have raised in connection with Dignitatis Humanae, the Catechism of the Catholic Church contains a number of crucial clarifications manifestly intended to banish unacceptable postconciliar appropriations of the teachings of Dignitatis Humanae, for example those that skew it in the direction of legal positivism.³ For his part, John Paul II left a rich body of teaching on the intrinsic connection between freedom and truth, which is the key to unlocking the deepest intention of Dignitatis Humanae. Without this key, its is a document that must remain a closed door -- or worse, a door that leads into another world than that of unanimous Catholic teaching prior to 1965.⁴

Preambles to Dignitatis Humanae

1. By its own admission, Dignitatis Humanae does not intend to address every aspect of the problem of religious liberty.
Russell Hittinger has often drawn attention to two facts: the geopolitical situation at the time of Dignitatis Humanae, with the still-fresh memory of the towering totalitarianisms of the Second World War as well as the ever-present threat of militant atheistic Communism, and the document's deliberate silence regarding the thesis-hypothesis debate (the "thesis" being that the Catholic Church, as the embodiment of the one true religion, must be the approved public religion of the State; the "hypothesis," that the evil of non-establishment or of pluralism could be tolerated to avoid a greater evil such as civic unrest).⁵ In that sense, Dignitatis Humanae is not first and foremost an abstract or theoretical treatment but a practical assessment of and approach to a current world situation, in which the Church is often persecuted and denied her legitimate freedom. Although it expresses general principles that are always valid, it does not take up some of the more complex questions as to diverse ways in which these principles could or should be realized in particular situations.

The immediate background in the 1960s is, of course, the de facto triumph of "liberal" democracies in one part of the world, and the ominous threat of their militant opponents, the Marxist-communist "people's republics." In this scenario, the points made by Pope Pius XII in his 1953 address Ci Riesce to the National Convention of Italian Catholic Jurists stand out all the more boldly: in some historical situations, the best -- in the sense of most prudent -- policy can be one of a broad toleration of religious half-truths and errors. But Pius XII insisted on an essential condition, as did Leo XIII: such toleration can only be justified by the general well-being of society, its common good, which may suffer more from attempts at suppression.⁶ The controversy over Dignitatis Humanae is largely a controversy over whether it is ever legitimate, in principle, for a government to oppose, prohibit, or prosecute religious errors. We shall return to this point.

2. At the insistence of Pope Paul VI, the final version of Dignitatis Humanae includes, near the beginning, the following unambiguous statement, intended as a hermeneutical principle for the remainder of the document: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.⁷ While the conciliar text does not expand upon or explain this affirmation, much less attempt to resolve apparent contradictions between it and other statements that follow in the document, the statement nevertheless makes it plain that however those other statements are to be interpreted, neither they nor the document as a whole may be interpreted in contradiction to the constant teaching of the preconciliar Roman Pontiffs, above all Leo XIII.⁸

General points on the "right to religious liberty"

According to unanimous papal teaching, no right of an individual is absolute and unconstrained; the natural moral law, as well as the Divine law, is always the measure of human actions and of the exercise of any right. In Pope John XXIII's formulation of this truth, man "has a right to freedom in investigating the truth, and -- within the limits of the moral order and the common good -- to freedom of speech and publication, and to freedom to pursue whatever profession he may choose."⁹ A right is understood as a "moral power," that is, a power, rooted in reason and free will, to pursue the good according to a well-formed conscience. Again John XXIII speaks to the point:

Also among man's rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public. According to the clear teaching of Lactantius, "this is the very condition of our birth, that we render to the God who made us that just homage which is His due; that we acknowledge Him alone as God, and follow Him. It is from this ligature of piety, which binds us and joins us to God, that religion derives its name."¹⁰

Accordingly, the right to religious freedom is nothing other than the right to pursue the truth about God and man without external interference or coercion. Hence, the freedom in question is a freedom from coercion, not a freedom from any social regulation whatsoever, much less a freedom of total indifference toward truth. The explanation just given is exactly what one finds in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In itself, the human will cannot be coerced, precisely because it is free by its very nature; it is a first cause of action within the human soul. It can, of course, be moved by God, the creator of man and all his powers, and such an internal motion is not only not contrary to the will's nature but most deeply in accord with it -- in fact, liberating, for grace heals and elevated the human will wounded and bent low by sin. Thus, metaphysically speaking it is not possible to coerce the will. For this reason, it is also not possible for any government to control what a man is thinking, what he thinks to be true, his search for truth, his silent prayer -- anything that takes place within his soul.

Attempts can be made and have always been made, however, to regulate the exercise of liberty as regards its outward manifestations, its social or public expression. It is necessary also to make a distinction between actions that are domestic (within the family circle) and actions that are civic or public, that is, open to a wider circle. The distinction is not always easy to make, but it has evident consequences for the understanding of law. Legal regulations governing the outward actions of men -- their speech and publications, their worship and works of art, and so forth -- are not only not contrary to human dignity, but are demanded by the very goods that civil society is designed to promote, such as order, peace, and justice. Put differently, it is never the case that men are, or should be left free to do or say absolutely anything at any time and in any place. On the contrary, the social exercise of free will is limited by the society's common good -- the good that pertains to and redounds to each and every member of that society. Thus John XXIII insists in Pacem in Terris that for every right there is a corresponding obligation or duty both to use the right well and to respect the rights of others. The right is bound internally by its purpose and externally but the freedom that must be guaranteed to others who are also pursuing legitimate ends:

The natural rights of which We have so far been speaking are inextricably bound up with as many duties, all applying to one and the same person. These rights and duties derive their origin, their sustenance, and their indestructibility from the natural law, which in conferring the one imposes the other. Thus, for example, the right to live involves the duty to preserve one's life; the right to a decent standard of living, the duty to live in a becoming fashion; the right to be free to seek out the truth, the duty to devote oneself to an ever deeper and wider search for it.¹¹

Shortly after this passage John XXIII extends his analysis to interpersonal relations: "Once this is admitted, it follows that in human society one man's natural right gives rise to a corresponding duty in other men; the duty, that is, of recognizing and respecting that right."¹² He draws the following conclusion: "Since men are social by nature [natura congregabiles], it is necessary for them to live together and to seek one another's good [alii aliorum quaerant bonum]. That men should recognize and perform their respective rights and duties is imperative to a well-ordered society."¹³ From this perspective, then, the question is not so much whether laws can be made to govern public actions, but which and what kind of laws are best in any given set of circumstances. The question of limits to the outward or public exercise of rights is always a question of the prudential order, and never a purely theoretical question.

If freedom, properly understood, is not mere freedom from constraint but freedom to embrace the good and the true, then free human actions can be either in accord with the good and the true, or directly opposed to them in varying ways. Prior to the invention of supposedly moral neutral political philosophies in the modern period, civil law -- together with its means of implementation, such as courts and punishments -- had always been understood as an instrument admittedly limited, by which at least the worst excesses of liberty against the moral law could be restrained and at the same time dispositions favoring virtuous actions could be formed in the citizens, so that they would be responsible members of society who actively contribute to its common good. This remains the Church's understanding of civil law, which is nothing other than a concrete specification of precepts of the natural law; for us there can be no morally neutral political philosophy or system of government.

A correct frame of interpretation

These things being premised, we are now in a position to see why John Paul II's constant teaching on the indissoluble link between freedom and truth is the key to a correct and consistent understanding of religious liberty. The only reason freedom is a good thing is that it is ordered to, and capable of attaining, truth. Freedom is only as worthwhile as its achievement of the goal. Thus, men are always and everywhere to be allowed the freedom -- to do what? To seek out and adhere to the truth. Why does Jesus say those sobering words about Judas, that "it would have been better for that man if he had not been born" (Mt 26:24)? Because Judas had received from God the gift of freedom but had then abused it radically, so that ultimately he gained nothing, indeed lost the very beatitude that is man's gained nothing, indeed lost the very beatitude that is man's end. Freedom is not a self-justifying, self-fulfilling good; it is, through and through, a power of seeking and adhering to the beloved. It is a noble power because, unlike a heavy object's falling without knowledge or spontaneity to a center of gravity, freedom implies the consciousness and movement from within or "motivation" of the one who is seeking and adhering.

The teaching that error has no rights remains untouched; one finds it not only in Leo XIII's social encyclicals but also in Pius XII's Ci Riesce and in John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. But the Church adds (and this is a central point in Dignitatis Humanae): Although error as such has no rights, the erring person does have rights, and his errors do not strip away those rights.¹⁴ The reason is that the erring person is, as a human person equipped with intellect and free will, naturally ordered to the truth by his conscience and by the author of his nature; no external agent can force him either to reach that truth or to renounce his errors, although certain errors may be judged sufficiently harmful to the common good that the expression and inculcation of these errors may be lawfully prohibited. Any attempt to force the recognition of revealed truth or the internal renunciation of religious error is contrary to human dignity as such, for man can only adhere to truth or renounce error from within. Note well that this statement is not incompatible with the efforts of civil power -- efforts always necessary -- to impose just limits on the way in which the right to search for the truth (as with any right to act publicly) is exercised, as well as on the public manifestations of the truth people believe they have found. On these points, the unsurpassed magisterial treatment remains that of Pius XII's Ci Riesce.

Catholic social teaching fundamentally repudiates the secularism according to which the State has no responsibility for the moral and religious formation of its citizens, even as the same teaching rejects the totalitarianism that sets up the State as final arbiter of moral and religious truth. This arbiter remains the Catholic Church (Dignitatis Humanae does not shy away from making strong statements to that effect), to which the State owes at least full freedom of action.¹⁵ Human governance, for its part, can indeed make it easier to attain the truth and easier to avoid error. For example, the State must do all it can to promote healthy family life and prohibit practices or vices that undermine it, such as fornication, polygamy, divorce, contraception, in vitro fertalization, abortion, and sodomy. All of this pertains to the natural law, which, on the one hand, it is the State's proper responsibility to uphold and promote, and which, on the other hand, it is the Church's province to interpret and clarify in accord with the full truth about man. Pace Justice Scalia, the role of civil authority and jurisprudence is ineluctably bound up with interpreting and appling the precepts of natural law; it is precisely these precepts that justify or even require that limitations be placed on the public exercise of human freedom. The Church has never adopted the enlightenment ideology of absolute rights -- rights that are foundationless, unrestrainable, autonomous. Instead, in Dignitatis Humanae itself, not to mention a host of other documents, she indicates that rights are correlative with duties and that no rights can be absolute but all are subject to the measure of the common good.¹⁶

Sources for a better understanding

When all is said and done, Dignitatis Humanae remains a problematic document if only because its own scope and method are left unclear to the reader and, as a result, its interpretation has been terribly, but predictably, vexed. It has given rise to acrimonious debate, intense partisanship, and even to real or emergent schism: leaders of the Society of Saint Pius X have pointed above all to Dignitatis Humanae as undeniable proof of the doctrinal discontinuity that justifies skepticism about the Second Vatican Council. It little helps most of us who are neither proficient in French nor have leisure for vast amounts of reading that a learned monk of the traditional Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux, Dom Basile Valuet, O.S.B., has published a 3,000-page definitive study of Dignitatis Humanae, responding to both Lefebrvist and liberal/modernist interpretations by documenting and defending the doctrinal continuity of Dignitatis Humanae with the entire preceding Catholic tradition. It is true that Dom Basile prepared a one-volume synopsis, which he personally told me he wishes to see translated into other languages than French, but to my knowledge, an English edition has not yet appeared.

Still, there are many good readings that shed light on the quetion of the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae. I highly recommend the following.

1. Thomas Storck has taken up the Dignitatis Humanae question three times: first, with an article in Faith & Reason, then with an article in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, and most recently with a chapter and appendix in his book Foundations of a Catholic Political Order.¹⁷ This last treatment is the best short treatment I know of.

2. For historical background and common sense textual analysis, see Russell Hittinger's "Dignitatis Humanae, Religious Liberty, and Ecclesiastical Self-Government," a chapter in his book The First Grace (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003). Related articles by the same author are "What Kind of Caesar?"; "The Pope and the Liberal State"; and "Making Sense of the Civilization of Love: John Paul II's Contribution to Catholic Social Thought."¹⁸ Although I am not completely convinced by some of Hittinger's arguments, I find his approach refreshingly uncluttered and certainly much better than interpretations that do not pay sufficient attention to historical context.

3. A goldmine of background and documentary information is contained in Michael Davies' The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty.¹⁹ Davies' approach is handicapped by methodological flaws that make it impossible for him to avoid drawing an unacceptable conclusion, namely, that Dignitatis Humanae fundamentally conflicts with the prior Magisterium of the Church. A review by Father Brian Harrison, O.P., exposes these flaws quite clearly, while praising aspects of Davies' work in other respects.²⁰

4. It is important to aquire a good grasp of the nineteenth-century historical situation and the way in which the papal teaching on State and society was precipitated and influenced by the fierce battle waged against the Church by rampant liberalism. Again, while not endorsing all their views, I recommend E.E.Y. Hales' Pio Nono, especially the chapter on the Syllabus of Errors,²¹ and Canon Roger Aubert's essay, "Religious Liberty from Mirari Vos to the Syllabus."²²

At the Second Vatican Council, the idea of a state that aimed to give public honor to God by privileging the Catholic religion was called into question. Some were saying: "We can't retain a double-faced policy (thesis/hypothesis) such that, if you are in power, you must grant freedom to us, but if we're in power, we don't need to grant freedom to you. How illogical!" In truth, this is no counter-argument at all; it is symptomatic, rather, of a sociologically eviscerated notion of "religion" that fails to give due primacy to the fullness of truth revealed by God and entrusted to the Catholic Church. Of course the Church has unique rights over civil society, even as she has a unique right to interpret the natural law without error. She is unique, period. The Catholic Faith is not one religion among many but the one true religion, of which all others (excepting, in a certain sense, the Jewish religion) are partial and groping images that arise principally from man and are inherently non-salvific. Hence a common political theory of the relationship between religion and civil society -- one that would take in the Catholic religion on equal terms with all other religions and treat them as if politically indistinguishable -- is impossible in principle, and so cannot be applied in practice.

In the end, there are two mutually exclusive political paradigms and paths, one of which must be taken while the other is left behind: Leonine Thomism and Lockean-Murrayite secularism. According to the first, the civil and ecclesiastical or kingly and sacerdotal powers are intended by God, their Creator and Redeemer, to stand in the correct hierarchical relationship, so much so that the very well-being of society and of culture depends intimately on the concrete realization of this relationship; according to the second, the two powers have no formal relationship at all, at best a tenuous material one. The contrast is like that between a marriage intended and sanctified by God, open to the gift of new life in the synergetic activity of procreation, and a couple without vows, living together for mutual convenience. In spite of superficial similarities, which may even include offspring, these avenues tend to go in opposite directions and, barring perversion or conversion, will end in opposite destinies.

Image Credits

• Vatican II, from Australian EJournal of Theology, August, 2003.
• Fathers of the Latin Church by Abraham Bloemaert
• The Cardinal in His Study by Giovanni Paolo Bedini

Notes

1. From the Holy Father's address to the Roman Curia, December 22, 2005. [back]


2. A well-known example of a false papal opinion was Pope John XXII's view, expressed in a sermon, that the righteous dead would not behold God until after the Last Judgment -- a view he later retracted. His successor Benedict XII solemnly defined the Church's teaching on this matter in 1336. It is, of course, important to distinguish between magisterial and non-magisterial statements of our pastors, since they are still legitimate pastors even when they do (as John XXII did) speak erroneously. [back]


3. See the Catechism, esp. 2104-9 (2109 specifically excludes conceiving of "public order" in a "positivist or naturalist manner") and 2136, but also 1731-33, 1738, 1747, 1782, 1884, 1887-88, 1898, 1907-12, 1925, 1930, 2084, 2235, 2244-46, and 2257. [back]


4. DH is a document misread by many not only because they have little familiarity with magisterial documents preceding it but also because they do not understand the canons of interpretation. The main canon is this: anything that has been repeatedly taught by the popes at a high level of authority and as pertaining to the essence of the Faith cannot, in principle, be contradicted by any later pronouncement. As one can see from reading Immortale Dei or Libertas Praestantissimum (an encyclical to which John Paul II was particularly fond of drawing attention), Leo XIII's main conclusions are presented not as prudential judgments but as timeless truths flowing from revelation and from first principles of reason. It is impossible that the Magisterium teach that the Catholic Church or the Catholic religion ought to be treated in exactly the same way as other religious bodies or opinions and that civil authorities/regimes have no positive responsibilities toward the one true religion. Indeed, Paul VI's crucial addition to the final draft of DH (discussed below) had no other purpose than to remind the reader of this point. [back]


5. I am speaking of a state that is predominantly Catholic in its population and rulers. Some have objected to this line of argument by saying that "the state is not competent to judge about religion." True but irrelevant. When Catholics who are competent to judge about religion form the majority, obviously -- if they really believe in Christ as king and savior of men and of societies -- they will desire to form a Catholic state. Consequently, it is not the state per se that makes the judgment, but Catholics who already know that theirs is the true religion. [back]


6. Recall that for Leo XIII, an increasing toleration of evils -- an increasing "liberalization" of society -- is a sign of weakness and imperfection of its government and its populace (Libertas Praestantissimum 33-35). [back]


7. Fourth paragraph of section 1. [back]


8. This is Thomas Storck's point of departure in the treatment given in Foundations of a Catholic Political Order (Beltsville, Maryland: Four Faces Press, 1998) as well as in his other publications on DH. [back]


9. Pacem in Terris 12. [back]


10. Pacem in Terris 14. Implied in the phrase "right dictates of conscience" is that the worship be given according to objectively true criteria, not merely what seems true to this or that person. Inevitably, a state will have to tolerate a certain amount of error in order to leave people sufficiently free to discover truth if they have not already found it. [back]


11. Pacem in Terris 28-29. [back]


12. Pacem in Terris 30. [back]


13. Pacem in Terris 31. [back]


14. See John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 157-60; John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, passim, esp. 32-35, 42, 61-64, 84, 93, 95=97, 104; Evangelium Vitae, passim esp. 18, 19, 24, 70-72; cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life. [back]


15. See, inter alia, DH Introduction and 14. In the former place we read: "God Himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve Him, and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness. We believe that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church." In the latter place: "the Church is, by the will of Christ, the teacher of the truth. It is her duty to give utterance to, and authoritatively to teach, that truth which is Christ Himself, and also to declare and confirm by her authority those principles of the moral order which have their origins in human nature itself." [back]


16. People have sometimes argued that DH replaced the old standard of "common good" with a new, positivistic standard of "public order." Apart from the salient fact that DH 7 does invoke the common good and the "objective moral order," such an interpretation is in any case expressly ruled out by the Catechism (see note 3 above). [back]


17. The first is available at http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/FR89103.HTM; the second used to be available but the link perished, while the third is out of print. There is a high likelihood that Foundations, which is quite simply essential reading for all who are eager to understand Catholic social teaching, will soon be made available online. [back]


18. The first appeared in Catholic Dossier; the second appeared originally in First Things and was published subjequently in A Free Society Reader, ed. Michael Novak (Lanham/New York: Lexington Books, 2000), 185-98; the third may be found in The Legacy of Pope John Paul II,Geoffrey Gneuhs, ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 71-93. [back]


19. Long Prairie, MN: Neumann Press, 1992. [back]


20. Published in Living Tradition, January 1993, the review may be accessed at http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt44.html. Father Harrison also has a set of very revealing essays called "Is John Cortney Murray a Reliable Interpreter of Dignitatis Humanae?? Here he documents cases of equivocation and mendacity on the part of Murray, who did all that he could to advance his own theory after the Council, in spite of the fact that the final text differed with him on a number of points. [back]


21. E.E.Y. Hales, Pio Nono: A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1954), 255-73; in the Doubleday Image Book papaerback edition, 265-86. [back]


22. The essay was printed in Historical Problems of Church Renewal, vol. 7 of Concilium (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1965), 89-105. [back]

[Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski is Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming. The present article, "Dignitatis Humanae: The Interpretive Principles," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition, Vo. 18, No. 1 (Winter 2009), pp. 12-17, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

John Lamont on what was wrong with Vatican II

Part I. Why the Second Vatican Council Was a Good Thing & Is More Important Than Ever

Longtime readers will remember the article by John Lamont published in New Oxford Review, which we reproduced online by permission of the editor: "Why the Second Vatican Council Was a Good Thing & Is More Important Than Ever" (Musings, August 31, 2005). That article was prompted by a question raised by NOR in response to a Crisis magazine article by George Sim Johnston, whose article was subtitled: "Why Vatican II Was Necessary." Dale Vree, the Editor of NOR, had written: "We'd dearly like to know why it was. We can think of a few things that Vatican II did that were good and necessary -- but only a few -- and we doubt if an ecumenical council was necessary to accomplish them." Lamont said that this was an excellent question that needs an answer, and his article was written to take up the challenge posed by it.

Lamont's article is one of the best I've seen and too long to be summarized here; but after making the case that the disasters that followed the Council were not caused by its documents, he gets down to the business of laying out why the Council was a good thing. Briefly, he argues that there were two kinds of problems the Council was required to address -- external and internal problems. External problems involved such things as Church-state relations, which required the sort of natural law argument for religious liberty made by Dignitatis Humanae; the evolving relations with Protestants and other non-Catholic Christians, which elicited the kind of ecclesiological statements one finds in Unitatis Redintegrato; and relations with the Jews, which demanded the Church's forthright rejection of antisemitism found in Nostra Aetate.

The internal problems addressed by the Council are far subtler, deeper, and more difficult to discern. It is here, however, that Lamont is particularly illuminating. Following Louis Bouyer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Servais Pinckaers, he sees these problems as ultimately stemming from the influence of nominalism on Catholic thought in the late Middle Ages, "an influence that gave rise to Protestantism, and that in the emergency of contriving a Catholic response to Protestantism was not properly eradicated." What sorts of problems does Lamont identify?

Among other things, there was a tendency to identify religion with obedience to orders and commandments, and to separate it from happiness and truth. One manifestation of this tendency was was anti-intellectualism and hostility towards reason: "If faith is a matter of obeying orders, then asking questions about Catholic belief is insubordinate." Another was the spiritual weakness stemming from a morality of obligation that regarded the development of a life of prayer, virtue, and pursuit of holiness as the province of the religious, rather than the laity. Yet another was a defective attitude toward the world resulting from this weakness: if religion is seen as a matter of obeying orders and the secular world is largely ignoring the orders, the orders themselves are seen as flawed, in need of being changed, or at least rephrased, to make them acceptable.

The Council addressed this weakness in four ways: it (1) presented Christ as the ultimate fulfillment of human nature, along Thomist lines, with the Church offering the means needed to attain this fulfillment; (2) asserted that everyone, not just religious, is called by God to be perfect; (3) insisted on the necessity of Catholics being familiar with the Scriptures; and (4) promoted, in Sancrosanctum Concilium, the revival of the liturgy that had been developing since the 19th century, and had been endorsed by Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei.

Yet, as Lamont states, "These attempts to address this fundamental weakness, however, were received by a Church that was still enthralled by them," which is what explains the disasters that followed the Council and the triumph of the very weaknesses the Council tried to remedy. "Its attempts at overcoming the nominalist mindset were interpreted as rejecting the previous requirement of obedience," freeing "all the bitterness and resentment that had been produced by such obedience ... untrammeled by any intellectual discipline or loyalty to truth. The idea of coming to terms with the world, which was given support by some utterances of John XXIII and Paul VI, was embraced as the main theme of the Council, despite the lack of any basis for it in the conciliar documents." The triumph of this weakness, according to Lamont, "means that the Council's teaching is even more important now than at the time it was convoked," an importance compounded by the fact that the basic Church teaching it sets forth, largely taken for granted at the time, is now widely rejected. "There does not seem to be a better way of promoting these teachings than by getting the clergy and laity to realize that they are taught by the Council that progressives claim as their own," concludes Lamont.

Part II. What was Wrong with Vatican II

Last year, John Lamont published another article, this time entitled "What was Wrong with Vatican II" (New Blackfriars, Vol. 88, 2007) [fee levied for online access]. He begins by rehearsing the broad outlines of the turmoil and catastrophe that followed the Council, admitted by no less an authority than Pope Paul VI in an often-quoted sermon on June 29, 1972, in which he remarked that "from some crack the smoke of Satan had entered the temple of God."¹ He notes that Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, distinguished two different ways of interpreting the Council -- a "hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture," and a "hermeneutics of reform." While applauding this analysis as quite correct, Lamont observes that it leaves certain questions unanswered. "The bishops at the Council were the same people who presided over the mess that followed," he writes. "For the most part, they either wholeheartedly accepted the "hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture," or else went along with measures that followed from it." While they may have done so for the most part in the sincere belief that they were implementing the Council, says Lamont, this raises a pressing question: "what was it about the Council that could have promoted its disastrous misinterpretation, and the calamities that resulted from it?"

While ecumenical councils cannot go wrong through teaching anything false, says Lamont, this does not mean that they cannot be "one-sided or ill-judged or even harmful in some respects"; and he gives as an example Canon 26 of the Third Lateran Council.² Nevertheless, at pains to make clear that he does not think the Council was simply a disaster, Lamont reiterates the claim of his earlier article that the Council was on the whole a good thing and introduced a number of important and needed reforms (see above). But this only makes more urgent the task of sorting out the Council's flaws from its achievements:

This task is especially pressing, in my view, because traditionalists have not gone about it in the right way. I do not think that the Council can be held responsible for the liturgical abuses that followed it; in this I am supported by the view of Fr. Louis Bouyer, an important figure in the liturgical movement, who remarked of the post-conciliar liturgical changes that "perhaps in no other area is there a greater distance (and even formal opposition) between what the Council worked out and what we have."³ Nor do I think that the Council contradicted previous Church teachings on religious freedom, as the Lefebvrists maintain -- the declaration Dignitatis Humanae, on religious freedom, was the most debated and revised document of the entire Council, precisely in order to avoid such a contradiction.

Here is where Lamont approaches his thesis, first by the partial insight found in a common criticism of Gaudium et Spes:

A better criticism of the Council focuses on its constitution Gaudium et Spes, and accuses the document of an unrealistically optimistic view of modern culture. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not get to the heart of the problems with the Council. The circumstances; they go deeper. They are found in two areas; in the Council's teaching on mission, and in the view of the human condition that underlies its approach to mission. By mission I mean the task of converting unbelievers to Catholicism.

A. The Council's teaching on mission

Lamont continues:

The trouble with the Council's approach to mission is that although it stresses that Catholics must seek to convert unbelievers, it gives no adequate reason for doing this. It does give Christ's command to evangelize as a reason, but it gives no proper explanation of why that command is given, or of the good that the commandment is supposed to promote. This, of course, means that the command is unlikely to be followed; and it has in fact been largely disregarded since the Council.

This omission, as Lamont points out, represents a departure from Catholic tradition, which is replete with references to evangelization as an activity that should be undertaken in order to save the souls of unbelievers. Lamont offers ample historical documentation, which I will not detail here. He carefully analyzes the historical statements on invincible ignorance, noting the non sequitur of leaping from the claim that unbelief is not a sin when it is beyond the control of unbelievers to the conclusion that unbelievers will therefore necessarily be saved, despite lacking faith or baptism and still being subject to original sin. Earlier discussions of the subject articulated a more balanced position. Pius IX's statement in Quanto Conficiamur Moerore that unbelief need not be a sin and that unbelievers can be saved despite their unbelief, was never intended or taken as more than a modal statement, an hypothetical possibility; it makes no claim about what actually happens. All of the positions taken by the Church historically entail that, although it is possible that unbelievers can be saved, we should nevertheless endeavor to convert them in order to save their souls. Lamont comments:

However, the Council did not state this balanced position. It made no reference at all to unbelief rendering salvation doubtful. Instead, in its decree on missions, Ad Gentes, it offers the following rationale for missionary activity:

"Christ himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mk. 16:16; Jn. 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter as through a door. Hence those cannot be saved whom, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded by God as something necessary, still refuse to enter it, or remain in it (Lumen Gentium, 14)." So, although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel to that faith without which it is impossible to please him (Heb. 11:6), the Church, nevertheless, still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize."⁴

As a rationale for missionary activity this is absurd, since it does not give a reason for trying to convert unbelievers generally, but only a reason for trying to convert those (presumably rare) souls who are already convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith, but obstinately refuse to follow its command to join the Church. It is in fact a rationale for avoiding missionary activity, since if people are not made aware that God founded the Church as something necessary for salvation, they cannot be lost through refusing to be baptized.

This neglect to mention the traditional rationale for mission could not fail to be noted by Catholics, and it led to predictable consequences. One was to lull Catholics into assuming that unbelief was not a serious obstacle to salvation, which eroded their interest in mission and evangelization. "This loss of interest was noted," says Lamont, "by John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, although that encyclical failed to properly address its cause." Another consequence was to lead Catholics to assume that the distinctive tenets of Catholicism and of Christianity were optional picture preferences. For if people who do not accept the distinctive tenets of Catholicism and Christianity can reasonably hope to be saved, then these distinctive tenets may obviously be thought to be unnecessary and discarded at will. Yet a third consequence for those Catholics who still continued to take salvation and evangelization seriously was to leave them vulnerable to the attraction of religious groups like Pentecostalists and other Evangelical Protestant sects who overtly stress the importance of mission and concern for the salvation of human souls. From this, says Lamont, stems the numerous defections of Catholics to Pentecostalists and other Protestant groups.

Lamont's discussion is detailed, and he considers various possible objections and offers replies; but these elude the scope of the present discussion.

B. The Council's teaching on the human condition

The second problem, the one underlying the Council's unsatisfactory teaching on mission, centers precisely on the reason for evangelization. Lamont writes:

The reason we cannot be confident of the salvation of unbelievers is that they are human, and are born into slavery to evil, suffering from the cancer of original sin. Damnation is the default setting for humanity -- that is why Christ had to die to redeem us -- so we can have no reason for expecting anyone to be saved unless they have undergone a real conversion. (This applies to Christians as well as unbelievers -- a Christian whose life is not noticeably different from those of the unbelievers around him has no reason to expect salvation.) To deny this is to deny the doctrine of original sin, and to ignore the evidence of human evil that is recorded in all of history. The Council did not of course actually make this denial; but, by remaining silent about salvation as a motive for missionary activity, it gave the impression that original sin and the evil that results from it are not realities. This failure to adequately acknowledge the reality of evil is the second problem with the Council.

Although the chief expression of this deficit is in the Council's teaching on mission, says Lamont, it can be found also in other places. For example, in Lumen Gentium, one of the most authoritative documents of Vatican II, one finds an unfolding of the inner nature and universal mission of the Church. Yet it's description of the Fall, says Lamont, passes over that event in the phrase: "when they had fallen in Adam, [God] did not abandon them."⁵ Missing is any explanation of the Fall, its effects, why Christ's death was needed to save us from it, or how Christ's death achieves this, even though these doctrines are indispensable for understanding the nature and mission of the Church. The problem, says Lamont, "goes deeper than being unrealistically positive about modern society; it is being unrealistically positive about the human condition itself.

This overlooking of the reality of sin and evil, according to Lamont, was the feature of the Council most responsible for the way the "Church of Vatican II" was fashioned by the bishops and curial officials after the Council. Lamont offers several examples:

(1) One example of an official implementation of this approach cited by Lamont is "the bowdlerization of the Divine Office, the public prayer of the Church." The Office, he notes, "is centered around the psalms, as is traditional, but every passage from the psalms -- and a few whole psalms -- that condemns evildoers, and threatens their punishment, has been removed." He mentions as an example Psalm 62(63), one of the most frequently recited Psalms in the Breviary, which stops at the line "My soul clings to You; Your right hand upholds me." The ending of the Psalm, with its negative message of condemnation upon the evil, however, has been removed. "This really shocking and blasphemous censorship of the Scriptures," writes Lamont, "illustrates how the 'spirit of Vatican II,' of which the refusal to acknowledge evil was a central part, was preferred to God's revelation."

(2) Another official measure Lamont considers is the new code of canon law promulgated after the Council. He cites canonists R. Michael Dunnigan and Charles Wilson as pointing out the greatly reduced role of penal sanctions in the new code, with penalties for specific crimes being reduced from 101 in the old code to 35 in the new, as well as concerns raised by Bishop V. de Paolis, formerly professor of canon law at the Gregorian University and secretary of the Apostolic Signature (the supreme court of appeal in the Church) at the time of Lamont's article.

(3) A third example mentioned is the abolition of the post of the devil's advocate in canonization cases

(4) A fourth is the "grave inadequacy of the new rite of exorcism," a rite, Lamont points out, "that has been described by the chief exorcist of Rome, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, as a farce."⁶

(5) On the level of one language group, as opposed to the whole Church, he notes the problem of the standard English versions of the liturgy originally produced by ICEL (the International Commission on English Liturgy) in the 1970s, "versions which the new secretary of ICEL, Fr. Bruce Harbert, has described as tending towards the Pelagian heresy."⁷

(6) As an example of policies not officially promulgated but generally agreed upon, Lamont cites the observation by Dunnigan and Wilson that even the reduced penal sanctions of the new code "have been tacitly abandoned, and that penal sanctions are no longer applied." The most scandalous instance, of course, is the sexual abuse by priests. While canon law requires the punishment of this offense (see canon 1395, sec. 2 of the 1983 code), the canonical requirement was ignored by bishops who simply refused to apply it. "This refusal was a reflection of the post-conciliar practice of appointing 'pastoral' bishops," writes Lamont. "A 'pastoral' bishop was understood to be one who would not confront rejection of the Church's doctinal and moral teachings, but instead treat such rejection as an acceptable option for Catholics -- and would require everyone over whom he had power to do the same."

(7) Turning to trends and policies outside the hierarchy, Lamont finds ready examples of the refusal to acknowledge evil in the wide acceptance of proportionalism and fundamental option theories by moral theologians. While both of these positions have been condemned by Rome, each is designed to permit or excuse actions formally condemned as mortally sinful, if not to completely remove any actual possibility of mortal sin. Another example of the influence of this mitigation of evil among self-styled 'progressive' Catholics is the general enthusiasm for some form or other of mitigated universalism as set forth by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which claims that we can at least dare to hope that no human being is damned. Yet another example is found by Lamont, also linked to von Balthasar, in the popularity of the connection between theology and aesthetics, which tends to minimize if not altogether neglect the problem of sin. "God is beautiful, and sin is ugly," writes Lamont, "but there is more to its evil than ugliness; ugliness in itself is not sin. Ugliness is unpleasant, but it does not as such attract the wrath of God and bring damnation."

What explains this refusal to acknowledge evil on the part of the Council, according to Lamont, and the adoption of this deficiency as the main aspect of postconciliar changes? "It should be stated that the postconciliar embrace of this refusal [to acknowledge evil] was partly due to shortcomings the Council tried to remedy," writes Lamont. Ignorance of Scriptures was one such shortcoming, and understanding of morality in terms of obligation (as detailed in Lamont's earlier article) was another. Yet none of these sorts of explanations explain the refusal to acknowledge evil on the part of the Council itself. Papal leadership, which Lamont discusses briefly, does not sufficiently account for it either. Given the time frame of the Council -- less than twenty years after Europe had been convulsed by the most brutal war in human history and during a period when a third of the world was groaning under communist tyranny (which the Council refused to condemn) -- this refusal to acknowledge evil, says Lamont, was "grotesquely incongruous and bizarre." Yet Lamont wonders whether it wasn't precisely this situation that led to the problem. In other words, Lamont wonders whether it wasn't the fact that the bishops of Europe had seen Europeans go from unprecedented cultural pre-eminence to committing the worst crimes in human history, that led them to recoil from the condemnation of evil. This reaction would have been exacerbated, particularly, in instances where they had found themselves compromised by moral dilemmas in the face of Nazi or Fascist rule. Lamont even speculates that the roots of this failure may go back to the Counter-Reformation, given that the idea that we have to rely on God's righteousness rather than our own is something that sounds Protestant to Catholics, and was thus devalued in the Catholic Church.

Be that as it may, Lamont states that it was not the Council's failure to acknowledge evil that was the cause of the diasters that followed it -- with the exception of the collapse in mission and evangelization. Yet "it was an indispensable catalyst for these disasters," he says, and lent them most of their strength. "Refusal to admit the existence of evil is not just a negative step; it usually leads to actual involvement in it. This is what happened after the Council, as the sexual abuse scandals illustrate."

How can this problem be corrected? While it is inevitable, as in the case of the sex scandals, that evil cannot be ignored forever, this recognition itself is insufficient. "In order for such a correction ot have its best effects in the Church," says Lamont, "it will be necessary to admit the one-sidedness of the Second Vatican Council with respect to evil, and to remedy this one-sidedness through a better understanding of the teachings of Scripture and tradition on the power and gravity of evil in this world, and on the warfare that Christians have to carry out against it."

Notes

1. Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, X: 1972 (Vatican City: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1972), p. 707. [back]


2. "... We declare that the evidence of Christians is to be accepted against Jews in every case, since Jews employ their own witnesses against Christians, and that those who prefer Jews to Christians in this matter are to lie under anathema, since Jews ought to be subject to Christians and to be supported by them on grounds of humanity alone" (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1: Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman P. Tanner S.J. [London: Sheed & Ward, 1990], p. 224). [back]


3. Louis Bouyer, The Decomposition of Catholicism, tr. C.V. Quinn (London: Sands & Co., 1970), p. 99. [back]


4. Vatican II, Decree Ad Gentes, para. 7, in Vatican Council II: The Counciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery O.P., new ed. (New York: Costello, 1992), p. 821. [back]


5. Vatican II, Dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, para. 2, in Flannery (1992), p. 350. [back]


6. In an interview in 30 Days, June 2001. [back]


7. In an interview in the Catholic Herald, May 2002. [back]

[John Lamont is professor at Catholic University of Sydney, 99 Albert Road, Strathfield NSW2135 Australia. Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]