“The Holy Spirit does not always prevent the necessary consequences of our negligence.” (Fr. Alvaro Calderon, Prometheus: The Religion of Man)
Among faithful Catholics who truly seek to understand the ongoing crisis in the Church, serious disagreements frequently arise regarding the best way to interpret Vatican II. On the one hand, many Traditional Catholics interpret the teachings of the Council to be a radical departure from what the Church has always taught — this framework of interpretation is often referred to as the “hermeneutic of rupture.” Conversely, many Catholics reject the hermeneutic of rupture because they believe that Vatican II, as an Ecumenical Council of the Church, could never actually break from the Church’s Tradition. These Catholics instead follow Benedict XVI in favoring the “hermeneutic of continuity,” whereby the Council is interpreted as being in continuity with what the Church has always taught.
As important as the debate over these two interpretive frameworks is, it fails to address two far more important questions: why did God permit the Council to create such problems, and what does He want us to learn from those problems? Indeed, if we focus on these questions we can better interpret not only what happened at Vatican II but also what has transpired for the past sixty years.
John XXIII named several heterodox theologians as influential experts for Vatican Council II, including Fathers Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, and Hans Kung. These men had been held under suspicion of heresy during Pius XII’s pontificate and yet they were given free rein to spread their errors during the Council.
While the questions about why God permitted Vatican II to create such problems necessarily involves some speculation, we can get a solid foothold on the analysis if we recognize that the Council began with a few egregious betrayals of the Catholic Faith from John XXIII and the progressive Council Fathers. No serious Christian familiar with salvation history can possibly overlook this reality that the Council began by insulting God through the betrayals considered below. If God were to have rewarded such betrayals, or even allowed them to go unpunished, it surely would have been the first such occurrence in the history of mankind.
How the Council Began by Betraying God and His Truth
As discussed in a previous article, John XXIII’s opening address of Vatican II fundamentally rejected the Catholic Church’s approach to condemning errors:
“The Church has always opposed these errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations. Not, certainly, that there is a lack of fallacious teaching, opinions and dangerous concepts to be guarded against and dissipated.”
As we know in our own spiritual lives, it is generally a sin of presumption to needlessly cast aside the precautions that God wants us to take to avoid evils. John XXIII’s sin was immeasurably worse because it exposed the entire Catholic Church to the greatest possible dangers.
John XXIII exacerbated this betrayal of God’s truth when he named several heterodox theologians as influential experts for his Council, including Fathers Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, and Hans Kung. These men had been held under suspicion of heresy during Pius XII’s pontificate and yet they were given free rein to spread their errors during the Council.
Finally, we can also consider how the progressive theologians hijacked the Council during its opening session with an act of open rebellion, described by Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen in his Rhine Flows Into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II:
“Archbishop Pericle Felici, Secretary General of the Council, was explaining the election procedures to the assembled Fathers in his fluent Latin when Cardinal Liénart, who served as one of the ten Council Presidents, seated at a long table at the front of the Council hall, rose in his place and asked to speak. He expressed his conviction that the Council Fathers needed more time to study the qualifications of the various candidates. After consultations among the national episcopal conferences, he explained, everyone would know who were the most qualified candidates, and it would be possible to vote intelligently. He requested a few days’ delay in the balloting. The suggestion was greeted with applause, and, after a moment’s silence, Cardinal Frings rose to second the motion. He, too, was applauded. After hurried consultation with Eugène Cardinal Tisserant, who as first of the Council Presidents was conducting the meeting, Archbishop Felici announced that the Council Presidency had acceded to the request of the two cardinals. The meeting was adjourned until 9 A.M. on Tuesday, October 16.”
While this may sound rather ordinary, here is how the coup was described by leading theologians:
Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens. “This was indeed a brilliant and dramatic turn of events an audacious infringement of existing regulations! . . . To a large extent, the future of the Council was decided at that moment. John XXIII was very pleased.” (Suenens, Memories and Hopes)
Fr. Yves Congar. “This little point was important. To begin with, all points of procedure are important: they involve the work of a group. In this case, the principal importance rests in the fact that THIS IS THE FIRST CONCILIAR ACT, a refusal to accept even the possibility of a prefabrication.” (Congar, My Journal of the Council)
Fr. Joseph Ratzinger. “The Council had shown its resolve to act independently and autonomously, rather than be degraded to the status of a mere executive organ of the preparatory commissions.” (Benedict XVI, Theological Highlights of Vatican II)
Fr. Henri de Lubac. “This dramatic little episode is spoken of as a victory of the bishops over the Holy Office. Other victories will no doubt be more difficult.” (de Lubac, Vatican Council Notebooks Volume One)
As a result of this unholy coup, almost all of the preparatory work for Vatican II was abandoned and the heterodox theologians were permitted to play the most important roles in drafting the Council’s documents. For this reason, the initial drafts of the Council documents included the most liberal ideas that the heterodox theologians thought they could advance; and the final versions of those documents reflect the ways in which orthodox theologians and Council Fathers attempted to counteract the liberal ideas. This is why the Council documents juxtapose liberal and conservative ideas, without any real attempt to harmonize the contradictions — and this pathetic reality lends support to both the “hermeneutic of rupture” and the “hermeneutic of continuity.”
And so the opening days of Vatican II set up a theological experiment of sorts: would God allow the Council Fathers and the Church to experience the consequences of the betrayals, or would He instead reward evil behavior by blessing those betrayals?
If we simply look at these three realities from the first days of the Council — abandoning the practice of condemning errors; appointing heterodox theologians as experts; and allowing the progressives to hijack the Council — it should be obvious that Vatican II began by betraying God and His truth. Moreover, these betrayals formed the foundation for the Council. Despite the best efforts of orthodox Council Fathers such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, there was no way to recover from the fact the entire Council was built on a betrayal of God’s truth.
The Theological Experiment
If Pius XII and his predecessors were correct, then these betrayals would constitute a tremendous offense against God. These offenses would naturally deserve God’s punishment, and we know that God’s punishments and corrections often consist of Him permitting us to experience the folly of our misdeeds so that we will abandon evil and return to Him.
And so the opening days of Vatican II set up a theological experiment of sorts: would God allow the Council Fathers and the Church to experience the consequences of the betrayals, or would He instead reward evil behavior by blessing those betrayals? Would the bad actions of John XXIII and the progressive Council Fathers bear good fruits, or would they bear bad fruits?
The Lessons from the Experiment
The world did not need to wait too long to see the results from the experiment. Paul VI announced the results in the decade following the Council:
“The Church, today, is going through a moment of disquiet. Some indulge in self-criticism, one would say even self-destruction. It is like an acute and complex inner upheaval, which no one would have expected after the Council. One thought of a flourishing, a serene expansion of the concepts matured in the great conciliar assembly. There is also this aspect in the Church, there is the flourishing, but . . . for the most part one comes to notice the painful aspect. The Church is hit also by he who is part of it.” (December 7, 1968)
“Through some cracks the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: there is doubt, uncertainty, problematic, anxiety, confrontation. One does not trust the Church anymore; one trusts the first prophet that comes to talk to us from some newspapers or some social movement, and then rush after him and ask him if he held the formula of real life. And we fail to perceive, instead, that we are the masters of life already. Doubt has entered our conscience, and it has entered through windows that were supposed to be opened to the light instead. . . Even in the Church this state of uncertainty rules. One thought that after the Council there would come a shiny day for the history of the Church. A cloudy day came instead, a day of tempest, gloom, quest, and uncertainty. We preach ecumenism and drift farther and farther from the others. We attempt to dig abysses instead of filling them.” (June 29, 1972)
Those who sought to defend the Church ought to have recognized that the crisis meant that they needed to reject the innovations of Vatican II. But two considerations prevented most otherwise serious Catholics from doing so: they blindly obeyed the hierarchy, and they believed that criticizing the Council would necessarily call into question the indefectibility of the Church. As a result, many Catholics who truly loved the Church were persuaded to defend what was destroying it.
Nonetheless, Francis’s hostile occupation of the papacy has afforded many faithful Catholics the occasion to realize that the conservative Catholic defense of Vatican II was always ill-conceived.
And so, it seems, God permitted the evils to grow even worse so that souls would eventually wake up. Tragically, it has not been the wicked enemies of the Church who have prevented this awakening but the conservative Catholics who so vehemently oppose any real criticism of Vatican II. Were it not for the conservative Catholic defense of Vatican II, far more souls would have rejected the errors fueling the current crisis and worked to repair the damage that has been done.
Nonetheless, Francis’s hostile occupation of the papacy has afforded many faithful Catholics the occasion to realize that the conservative Catholic defense of Vatican II was always ill-conceived. Still other serious Catholics have sadly adopted the nonsensical belief that the crisis in the Church began with Francis — as though Paul VI was just imagining that the crisis existed when he made his alarming statements in 1968 and 1972. This polarization is among the least appreciated, but most monumental, effects of Francis’s reign.
Regardless of how many Catholics awaken to the reality of Vatican II, God has allowed the Council and its aftermath to teach the following painful lessons:
- The pre-Vatican II popes were right in the condemning errors that presently plague the Church
- Just a small amount of theological error is fatal
- Blind obedience can be catastrophic
- The Church’s enemies are aided by the compromises of good Catholics
- God preserves those who do not compromise with error
- The world suffers when the Church’s truth is obscured
- God will not be mocked
If, instead of promoting false ecumenism and religious liberty, Vatican II had emphasized these lessons, it would have been a tremendously useful Council. However, no matter how eloquently and emphatically the Council would have been able to speak on these matters, it never could have approached the value of seeing these lessons concretely demonstrated for over sixty years. We are, in this limited sense, better off for having suffered the evils brought about by the Council. In all other respects, the Council has been an unmitigated disaster for the Church and world because it was built on a foundation of betraying God and His truth.
Is this the best way of interpreting Vatican II — the hermeneutic of God allowing us to learn painful lessons? It depends. If we are content to suffer through this crisis without a satisfactory explanation for why God is permitting it, then we will have little interest in seeing the Council in light of the lessons we should learn from it. If, however, we are inclined to fit the plainly observable realities of Vatican II and its aftermath within the framework of what we know about God’s Providence, then it is arguably the most reasonable way to interpret the Council. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
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