← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 16067 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-12-23
2004-12-23 00:21 | User Profile
More on Vatican II's doomed attempt to co-opt modernity
Before posting the discussion on Vatican II, I had asked our participant Matt, who is Catholic, what he thought of it, and his answer adds to our understanding of the "squishy ambiguity" of the Vatican II documents referred to by "A" in that earlier entry:
Larry,
I don't know that I have much to add to your summary. Whatever else may be said about the Reformation, when we sawed Christendom down the middle we broke something so badly that it is difficult to envision it ever righting itself. Perhaps it is the ultimate test of faith to live in such times. And I think there is merit in it when you say that they went in the opposite direction from what was needed.
I tend to think of the whole "Catholic phenomenalism" thing as an attempt to corrupt modern language with traditional Catholic concepts; an ill-conceived attempt to beat them by joining them that actually accomplishes the reverse. The modern age is on the whole a story of corruption from within (that is, where open conflict is avoided as much as possible and the real wars take place behind closed doors, couched in diplomatic language); and Vatican II is the Church's apparently vain attempt to corrupt modernism from within rather than calling it to repentance from without. Vatican II was perhaps intended at least by some as a call for a phenomenological crusade against modernism using weapons of charity: get to the lost where they sleep, eat, live, breathe, and politic every day, to cross the cultural sea rather than the geographic one.
But at the end of the day it is one thing to eat with the prostitutes and another thing entirely to sleep with them.
Pope Paul VI explicitly stated, in the Council documents, that the Council was pastoral and does not carry the weight of dogma except where it says so clearly and explicitly. And as far as I can tell it never says much of anything clearly and explicitly.
I've tried on a number of occasions to read the "balanced" accounts of Vatican II (e.g. The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber) and I find it breaks my ability to concentrate in short order, every time. The actual documents of Vatican II are like that too. On one side of the 1960's you have bracing clear-headed encyclicals confronting modernism, condemning error, and presenting positive dogma; and on the other side the words are so tortured and deliberately ambiguous as to make any attempt to read them maddening. For example, the always-and-everywhere teaching against forced conversion is re-articulated as a "right to religious freedom" in an attempt to coopt what liberals mean by "religious freedom"; and what everyone hears is that "ex ecclesium nullus salus" has been revoked, modernism has won.
The attempt to suspend judgment on the edge of a cliff of ambiguity can't last forever though. It is an intrinsically unstable state, this state of perpetual ecumenical dialogue, of perpetually making nice rather than allowing the divisive truth to be spoken unambiguously. Where it will all lead is anyone's guess, but we can be assured that it will not stay suspended as it is. These are not good days to be a status-quo conservative.
Matt
[url]http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002900.html[/url]
An idiosyncratic explanation of Vatican II
The below exchange about Vatican II is from an e-mail discussion that began with my question about whether Pope Pius X, promulgator of the great Oath Against Modernity, was anti-Jewish. It then turned into a discussion of Vatican II, ending in a perhaps idiosyncratic theory I present about it. In that comment, I feel that I've touched on the answer to something that has been puzzling me for years: the indefinable quality of the Roman Catholic Church that had always kept me, personally, from being drawn to it, despite the fact that I'm very much drawn to everything about the Church of the Middle Ages, and, further, how this quality connects the pre-Vatican II Church with the post-Vatican II Church. Among other things, I also think I've identified the source of the error that I've decried for many years in the pro-life movement: that it focused just on abortion, while failing to challenge the entire modern culture of which abortion was an inevitable outcome.
My correspondents are identified by single initials, I'm identified by both my initials. R is an agnostic philosopher sympathetic to Christianity, A. is a Catholic, E is a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union.
R:
What I find most inexcusable about Vatican II is that it is possible to bicker endlessly over whether it represents an absolute and official statement of the Church's position or not.
There is no excuse for something so fundamental to be ambiguous. This to me is red flag of sleazy dealing.
A:
Ambiguity and squishy language pervades the documents. I believe that the Council will be best remembered for its utter impotence and uselessness once the Vatican II generation of clerics has gone and all the nonsensical sycophantry about it ceases to be obligatory.
R:
Thank you for confirming my thesis: you have a fundamental change in the Catholic Church (please don't waste my time denying this) and it isn't even clear whether it's actually official or not.
How any institution could expect to thrive, which allows such things, is beyond me.
LA:
Vatican II: Just another leftist monstrosity foisted upon the world, which does untold damage until it's finally revealed as the fraud that it is.
R:
I want to know how they managed it.
E:
Liberal self-hatred.
R:
The problem with this theory is that Catholicism survived the Catholic guilt it generates for so long. What changed?
E:
John XXIII was Papal Nuncio in Istanbul during the Holocaust and saved dozens of Jews. He probably felt very guilty about what happened in Europe and decided that the atmosphere of Jew-hatred was partially the Church's fault and that liberalizing reforms should be made. Adam probably has a different, more accurate explanation since he's much more knowledgeable about the Church P.S.: I think that another tragic consequence of Vatican II was the beginning of the acceptance of sodomites into the priesthood. I've never heard of a pedophile priest scandal that took place before Vatican II.
A:
Why do Jews always think everything is about them?
I seriously doubt John XXIII felt guilty about the holocaust, especially since he and Pius XII did everything possible to save Jews from it. He was certainly a philosemite, and he without doubt desired better relations with Jews, but that is only a small part of the story.
His motives for calling Vatican II had more to do with his dislike of the "fortress" mentality of the pre-Vatican II Church. He perceived Catholics as retreating from the world and not engaging non-believers the way we should.
He wanted the Church to engage the world more, naively hoping that dialogue with non-believers and modernists would help bring them to Christ.
Modernists hijacked the council, mostly after his death, and turned "dialogue" as an end in and of itself. Among other things.
LA:
And what an error!
The truth of Christianity is eternal, always new and fresh. It didn't need to speak the language of modern humanism to reach people, it just needed to speak the language of Christianity.
But a possible problem was that, very likely, the experiences and language prevalent inside the Church HAD gotten stiff and stale and musty and dusty and broken down and repressive and like a sick room. And THAT kind of language would not appeal to people in the 20th century or any other century! So it wasn't a modernization of the Christian message that was needed, but a re-Christianization of the Christian message. So they went in exactly the opposite direction from what was needed. What a disaster! What ruin for Christianity, for our civilization, for the human race.
This is what liberals and leftists ALWAYS do. They sense something is wrong. But instead of going back and revivifying things at the root, which is the answer, they move further away from the root, in search of something new.
In other words, the Church prior to Vatican II was already too much like Nietzsche's caricature of Christianity--a sick room, a place for the consoling of broken-down spirits, rather than a place for the truth and joy of Christ and the Gospels and salvation. So, sensing that something was wrong, what did they do? Instead of moving back toward Christ and life, they adopted the view of liberal, humanistic man. Instead of leaving the Church's hospital room and returning to the altar of God, they secularized the hospital room. In place of a broken down Christian victimology (a victimology that the Church had always overemphasized at the expense of the positive aspects of Christian truth and that had made the post-Counter-Reformation Church so heavy and material rather than spiritual and uplifting), they adopted liberal victimology, a victimology that had less and less to do with God and instead got into class conflict, social protest, guilt over racism, liberation theology, whiny pacifism, obsessive focus on the right to physical life (anti-abortionism) rather than spiritual life (which would have led them to an attack on the whole culture, not just on abortion!), opposition to capital punishment, and all the rest.
To expand on what I said about anti-abortionism and how it fits with my theme: the post Vatican II Church secular-humanized itself. One expression of that has been an inordinate focus on "welfare" type issues--human rights, immigrant rights, physical well being, economic equality, and so on--in place of basic Christian doctrine and liturgy. Then Roe v. Wade happened, which was a monstrosity, and the Church totally focused on the wrong of abortion, while utterly failing to oppose the general liberationist culture of which abortion was an inevitable expression. In other words, having liberalized/humanized/secularized itself, the Church made a fetish out of the "Culture of [Physical] Life," which it counterposed to the "Culture of Death," meaning those aspects of modern society that allowed abortion as well as other supposed attacks on the human person such as capital punishment and restrictions on immigration. Yet, at the same time, because the Church had thrown away so much of its spiritual core, it failed to oppose the modern culture as a whole, which was anti-spiritual life. It could only oppose the grossest expression of that culture, abortion, not the culture itself.
To boil this down, the excessive emphasis on the victimhood of Christ that had characterized the Counter-Reformation, pre-Vatican II Church, was changed, in the post-Vatican II, liberal-humanism Church, into the excessive emphasis on the victimhood of man. And so we have today's Pope, always whining about the "human person" and his need to be treated decently. For this Pope, man is not primarily an active being who finds his true self in relation to God, rather he is someone who is primarily defined by his need for other people to act and do for him, to protect his rights, to take care of his material and social needs, to fulfill his cultural requirements, to respect and never violate his precious human personhood. It's a vision of the human race as the client of a vast social welfare agency.
In the same way, and expressing the same sensibility, President Bush in his 2001 Inaugural Address treated America as one vast collection of victims needing succour. I found Bush's victimological treatment of America deeply offensive and demoralizing. "Conservatives" were ecstatic over it, because it used biblical imagery.
[url]http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002899.html[/url]
Are charges against Pius X true?
In reply to my recent praise of Pope Piux X for his Oath Against Modernity, a reader quoted to me a New York Times article charging Piux X with, among other things, failing to refute the Blood Libel charge. If anyone has any information about this, could you please write to me. Here is the exchange.
Reader to LA:
Here is a quote from Gary Wills' review of the book "The Popes Against the Jews" by David I. Kertzer appearing in the New York Times 23 September 2001:
None of the modern Piuses comes off well. Pius X favored a high official in his secretariat of state, Monsignor Umberto Benigni, who became one of the two principal distributors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Italy. Pius also refused to intervene in the 20th century's most famous trial of a Jew on the ritual murder charge, a trial conducted in Kiev in 1913. After a Catholic priest testified to the court that such murders were an established fact of history, British Jews asked the Catholic Duke of Norfolk to request from the pope a denial of the libel. Pius X's secretary of state would not deny the myth, or send information about false uses of it directly to the presiding judge. As Kertzer notes, 'by not taking this step, the pope allowed the Catholic press, including that part of it viewed inside and outside the church as communicating the pope's true sentiments, to continue to tar the Jews with the ritual murder charge.' This is the pope canonized by Pius XII in 1954.
If as you say, Pius X recognized the truth, then the Protocols must be true and Mendel Beilis was surely guilty of ritual murder.
LA to reader:
I know little about Pius X other than what I was reading last night and his stand against Modernism. I would not take what the NY Times says on such a matter as the truth. I'm certainly interested in knowing the truth. Some of the claims are vague or guilt by association. The charge that he refused to refute the Blood Libel strikes me as very serious and I want to look into this further.
I know as a fact from previous charges against Popes how many are false. For example Pius XII, before he was Pope, met diplomatically with some Bolsheviks and afterwards in a report to the Vatican described them in graphic and negative terms. But because he included the word "Jews" in the description, liberal opinion now considers the statement proof of his anti-Semitism. So we can't automatically believe what the Times is saying about Pius X and we need to get the facts. Also, as I'm sure you're aware, Gary Wills, a nominal Catholic, is a leftist enemy of Christianity. That doesn't mean the charges against Pius X are not true, of course, but one must approach critically any charges made by Gary Wills against the Church.
[url]http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002897.html[/url]
Pope Pius X: the ur-traditionalist
I'm thinking of the saying, made by a conservative wag a few years back, that any institution that is not explicitly conservative in its identity and mission will inevitably turn liberal over time. I'm also thinking of my own observation that a traditionalist (or a reactionary) is a person who perceives a mortal threat to his society the moment it appears, unlike a conservative, who only perceives the threat after the society is half-destroyed, and unlike a liberal, who only sees the threat after the society is completely destroyed. Well, here's someone who really understood those principles, Pope St. Pius X, in his Oath Against Modernism, issued in 1910, and required of every priest and every person teaching in a Catholic school or seminary.
Here's a Pope! He recognizes what is true, he recognizes what is false, and he draws a line between them. There are no major figures like this in our world today. Let us pray and work for their return!
[url]http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002893.html[/url]
Oath Against Modernism [url]http://www.saint-mike.org/Library/Papal_Library/PiusX/Letters/Modernism_Oath.html[/url]
2005-01-13 00:47 | User Profile
[COLOR=DarkRed]Hello,[/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkRed]I find Vatican 2 to be a watered-down in wording. To me tha Catholic Church is what it allways will be. Wether or not they concider non-Catholic Christians to be "Seperated Brethren" rather then "Imitation Christians" now, isnt hiding that there still tha One True Church and you all need to come back. [/COLOR] [COLOR=DarkRed]Or at least see them as knowing God better then you. And of course their Pontiff is your spiritual authority to.[/COLOR] [COLOR=DarkRed]Many claim that this present Pontiff is tha most loved/admired out of all of them. Billy Graham says that this Pontiff is a guide and inspiration to him from a article i was readin. Its interesting because he was Anti-Catholic at one time. Does tha pychological and cultural revolution of tha 60's/70's have anything to do with that? Is Vatican 2 a product of that? And was it tha 60's or tha 70's? And what exactley was it?[/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkRed]Peace![/COLOR] [COLOR=DarkRed]WesleyWes[/COLOR][COLOR=DarkRed] Founder, [url]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anti-Catholic[/url][/COLOR] :thumbsup: