A Half Century of Ecclesial Chaos
(Vatican II to Turn 50)
David Martin POSTED: Tuesday, March 03, 2009
GUEST COLUMNIST
The Remnant Newspaper
www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2012-0815-martin-vatican-II-turns-50.htm
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(www.RemnantNewspaper.com) A key feature of the Second Vatican Council was its unprecedented suggestion of the idea that all other religions are more or less different branches of the same Universal Church of Christ. To actually assert this would have been heretical, of course; but the insinuation seems to have been engendered by the presence of Protestant delegates who were invited to the Council as consultants on matters of liturgy and doctrine (Michael Davies, Pope John’s Council, 1977). Their names for the record were: Canon Jasper, Dr. McAfee Brown, Professor George Lindbeck, Professor Oscar Cullman, Pastor Rodger Schutz, and Archdeacon Pawley (among others).
Unfortunately, these emissaries of false religions played a significant role in shaping various aspects of at least some of the Council documents. Augustine Cardinal Bea, who headed up the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity, boasted of the contribution made by the Protestant envoys in formulating the Council’s decree on Ecumenism, for example. “I do not hesitate to assert that they have contributed in a decisive way to bringing about this result.” And according to Professor B. Mondin of the Pontifical Propaganda College for the Missions, delegates such as Dr. Cullman made “a valid contribution” to drawing up the Council documents.
Because of their contribution, the documents introduced novel language such as, “In prayer services ‘for unity’ and during ecumenical gatherings, it is allowable, indeed desirable that Catholics should join in prayer with their separated brethren.” (Unitatis Redintegratio) And what are we to make of this perfidious blunder from the same document: “The Holy Spirit does not refuse to make use of other religions as a means of salvation.” This contradicts the Church’s dogma that the Holy Spirit works only through the Catholic religion, outside of which there is no salvation (extra ecclesiam nulla salus).
The Council seems to have been intent on rehabilitating the cause of Martin Luther, as Catholics discovered in the 1980 Joint Catholic-Lutheran Commission, which grew out of Vatican II: “Among the ideas of the Second Vatican Council, we can see gathered together much of what Luther asked for, such as the following: description of the Church as ‘The People of God’ (a democratic and non-hierarchic idea); accent on the priesthood of all baptized; the right of the individual to freedom of religion.”
Luther founded the Protestant religion on the false premise that Christ died on the Cross to dispense with our obligations to God (Ten Commandments) so that we may sin freely without worry. Consider his famous quote from August of 1521: “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly… No sin will separate us from the Christ, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.” (From Luther’s famous letter to Philip Melanchthon, August 1, 1521, Luther’s Works Vol. 48, pp 281-282)
Herein is the crux and foundation of Protestantism which asserts that Jesus already paid the price, so that our works will neither save nor condemn us. This was a key error of the Reformation that was condemned by the Council of Trent, yet Vatican II asserts that the Holy Spirit works through such a religion and even declares its liturgies and ceremonies to be the manifestation of God’s workings within their institution:
“The brethren divided from us also carry out many liturgical actions of the Christian religion. In ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or community, these liturgical actions most certainly can truly engender a life of grace, and, one must say, can aptly give access to the communion of salvation. It follows that the separated Churches and communities… have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as a means of salvation.” [UR-3)
Equally disturbing is how the Council seems to attribute to the workings of the Holy Spirit this ecumenical movement to unite all religions into a one-world religion. "Among our separated brethren there increases from day to day the movement, fostered by the grace of the Holy Spirit, for the restoration of unity among all Christians. This movement toward unity is called 'ecumenical'... the one visible Church of God." [UR 2]
The one visible Church of God is the Roman Catholic Church established under the authority of Peter and guided by the popes for the past 2000 years. It is dogmatically taught that none can be saved outside this Church. “It must be held by faith that outside the Apostolic Roman Church, no one can be saved; that this is the only ark of salvation; that he who shall not have entered therein will perish in the flood.” (Pope Pius IX, Singulari Quadem, 1854)
The Council’s design to ecumenically unite all religions seems to have been foreshadowed in the writings of nineteenth century Freemason and excommunicated priest, Canon Roca (1830-1893), who predicted that “the liturgy of the Roman Church will shortly undergo a transformation at an ecumenical council” in a move “to deprive the Church of its supernatural character, to amalgamate it with the world, to interweave the denominations ecumenically instead of letting them run side by side as separate confessions, and thus to pave the way for a standard world religion in the centralized world state.” (Bishop Rudolph Graber PhD, Athanasius and the Church in our Time, 1974)
Canon Roca speaks of a New World Order to come (Novus Ordo Seclorum) which would war against the Order of Tradition. The Second Vatican Council was an opening for this Masonic thread to weave itself into the Church’s fabric, thus cloaking the Mystical Body with a new garb. Though the Council was started with the best resolves, the storm of conspiracy rushed in, causing the pope to eventually cry out that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan entered into the temple of God.” (Pope Paul VI, June 29, 1972)
Vatican II indeed was that fissure through which the infernal enemy first slipped into the Church. The adversary knew that if he could get his foot in the door he could use the Council to decree error if his agents could simply gain control of the Council’s drafting apparatus, which unfortunately they were able to do (Father Ralph Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber).
So with the 50th Anniversary of Vatican II approaching this October 11, it behooves the Catholic hierarchy to take a second look at the Council and how it was used by the enemies of religion to steer the Barque of Peter onto a new and destructive course. The Council was convoked with good intent, but the doors were opened to outsiders and those alien to the Faith, and because the Council was not dogmatic in nature it left an opening for these agents to plant their doctrinal and liturgical time bombs into the Council documents.
The only recourse for liberating the Church from this quagmire of relativism is to confess that a mistake was made at the Second Vatican Council, and the approaching 50th Anniversary of the Council is an appropriate time for the hierarchy to do just that. “The truth will make you free.” (John 8:32) Let them heed the exhortation of St. Paul to “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) Pope Benedict XVI accentuates this very point in his April 30, 2011 document on the Tridentine Mass: “What was sacred for prior generations, remains sacred and great for us as well.” (Universae Ecclesia)
[A perverse paraphrase of John 8:32 (And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free); or, to quote the comic-strip character Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us"?]
The Second Vatican Council has already made us free
Aug. 07, 2012
By Robert Blair Kaiser
ncronline.org/news/second-vatican-council-has-already-made-us-free
COMMENTARY
Over the weekend, an editor on the Internet observed that many events this year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council “seem to be wakes, lamenting and grieving over the lost opportunity.”
Rather than wring our hands over what the church has become under back-to-back popes who have acted in an arrogant and authoritarian manner, we should celebrate what Vatican II has already done for us.
It has given us a new view of ourselves. It’s made us more free, more human and more at the service of a world that Jesus loved.
It has given us a new view of the church. It’s our church, not the pope’s church, or the bishops’ church, or a priest’s church.
It has given us a new view of our place in it. We can think, we can speak, we can act as followers of Jesus in a world that needs us.
Rather than whine over what daddy won’t let us do, we can put the Council into play ourselves.
American nuns showed us how.
In 1979, Mercy Sr. Theresa Kane, then the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, told Pope John Paul II the church ought to be ordaining women. Doing that, she implied, the church could break the stained-glass ceiling and give first-class citizenship to half of its membership, the women in the church.
The pope put her down with a scripted lesson from history that was not history. He said U.S. nuns should model themselves on the Blessed Virgin Mary, “who was never a part of the hierarchy, but made all hierarchy possible because she gave to the world the shepherd and bishop of our souls.”
The pope wouldn’t let Kane give him the answer he deserved — that in Mary’s time, there was no such thing as a hierarchy, and that Jesus was not a bishop. He wasn’t even a priest.
Instead of turning tail, Kane and many U.S. nuns went ahead and continued to do what the Council had told them to do: “Update, renew, go back to your sources.” They became more free, more human and more at the service of the world.
They were always teachers. Now they became scholars and theologians, chief executives of hospitals, legal aid lawyers, and social workers and martyrs in countries like El Salvador. They took on issues — peace, economic injustice, racism, women’s rights, interfaith relations and environmentalism — that put them in collegial working relationships with bishops also pushing those causes.
Now Pope Benedict XVI has dissed them for doing that. Too much emphasis, he has said, on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and finding shelter for the homeless. Why don’t the sisters help the bishops speak out on core faith issues like birth control and abortion?
We shall soon see the sisters’ answer to that question. They will say the pope can’t force them to talk nonsense, and he can’t stop them from feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and finding shelter for the homeless.
He can’t stop us, either. There’s no suppressing of the spirit of Vatican II. John W. O’Malley, a Jesuit historian of the Council, has epitomized it for us. The Council moved us to a new vision of the church:
… from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to service, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behavior modification to inner appropriation.
We can put the spirit of the Council into play in our own little part of the universe. We don’t have to seize moral leadership from our bishops. They have already lost it with 90 percent of us by covering up for their wayward priests.
With the cogency of our arguments, we can further marginalize our bishops every time they misinform the people and the press about “the Catholic position” on moral issues that are beyond their competence. (The bishops try to confuse us by telling us that moral and political questions are “faith issues.” The reasonableness of family planning is a moral issue, and therefore something we come to by reason, not faith. The ordination of women — well, if we understand politics as an answer to the question, “Who’s in charge here?” then that’s a political issue.)
We can continue to seek justice with our brothers and sisters across the whole religion landscape (and break bread with them, too).
We can continue to applaud our scholars and theologians and when they give us a take on the Gospel in words that we, our children and grandchildren can understand.
When we find ourselves in backward-thinking parishes, we can start up our own small-faith Eucharistic communities. When enough of us start doing that, the bishops will begin to understand. They need us more than we need them.
[Robert Blair Kaiser, who covered Vatican II for TIME magazine, is the author of five books on the Council. He will be doing an international lecture tour on the council starting in the fall.]
a kangaroo?
Even worse: a kangaroo’s pet pelosi.