The below is from the response of Fr. Aidan Nichols to a fascinating discussion in the Catholic Herald that continues. Do read it all!!Grace, so understood, is always at work, saving people from the worst consequences of the Fall; nudging them towards genuine, not merely putative, truth, goodness, beauty; preparing them for conversion to the Gospel; neutralising the efforts of the fallen angels to use man-devised religions, philosophies, institutions, moral codes for their own destructive ends. There may even be grace-enabled ways in which humanity not only preserves some of the goods with which it was created but is united, anonymously, with God in Christ in his saving work on the Cross and in the Resurrection, and so brought, without awareness of the fact, to evangelical holiness, although of these Revelation does not speak. They are, as the Council itself wisely puts it (in the Pastoral Constitution, in fact!), known to God alone.
The confusion engendered by cultural naïvety produced the "dismantling" of so much of the institutional life of the Church which - as, dear Moyra, you rightly say, so distressed many, undermining the confidence of traditional Catholics in the Council in the later Sixties and since.
I think not only of the consequences for preaching and, in some places, the spirit in which the Liturgy was conducted but also of the effective secularisation, in various countries, of so many Catholic universities, hospitals, schools, trades unions, political associations and even religious congregations and programmes of catechesis.
The "knock-on" effects have been truly horrendous. That is why, this time, we must get this right.
8 comments:
Truly fascinating Jeff. What does he mean however by 'this time'?
The tension in the interpretation of the Council - and not just at the opposite extreme ends of the St Pius Society and the faculty of the University of Georgetown or Notre Dame - remains a very deep problem for faithful Catholics going into the next century. As someone who thinks that Vat 2 re-wrote the book on Councils and the Church's view of itself and its mission (and that isn't a criticism), I understand why some people would be troubled by the implications of its primary documents, though more so in years past by the ham-handed and sometimes silly ways (at least in the US) some have tried to make changes - especially in the liturgy.
I need to send this to my dear friend who is going through the RCIA process with me.
He, like myself, love and believe in The Church and all that she has and still proclaims. Recently, in a class we are taking on NT, he has become completely discouraged.
The course is being taught by an articulate and scholarly Catholic professor. However between the other students comments and this professor's, it's hard to know what is acceptable dialogue.
Jeff, could you tell me the name of the Vatican II document on Ecumenicism that speaks about the Church and it's relationship with the Jewish, Muslim and various other faiths? I remember vaguely it being two words in Latin (of course). The first was "A".
This is becoming a big issue with my friend who is in a very bad place now. I think I have explained to him how alot of "liberal" Catholics have still hijacked the spirit of Vatican II.
I just need something concrete to set his mind at ease.
PAX,
Teri
UNITATIS REDINTEGRATIO
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19641121_unitatis-redintegratio_en.html
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html
Dominus Iesus
Thanks so much! Just got the link and it also helped me find the document the Professor was touting:
Nostra Aetate
PAX,
Teri
Oh right! Glad you found what you were looking for. I was not certain. I trust all is well.
Ha! As the days grow closer to coming into full communion, I feel as though I've had a target on my back: "Please discourage, dishearten, shake my faith and otherwise dump the proverbial loo on me. Thank you."
Both my friend and I feel it more and more. I told him today it looks like they dumped the loo and I'm standing in the refuse up to my ankles!
We agree if it wasn't the right thing, we wouldn't be getting so much oppression and discouragement from all sides.
and how was your day? :-)
Teri, This happened to me also on the eve of my reception into the Church. I mean, for weeks and weeks and weeks. I actually chickened out the day it was supposed to happen and let my two friends be received without me. I wandered around for two more weeks and then found a priest and made
my profession of faith all by myself. (It was a pre VII profession even though this was 1972, very tough and explicit.)
A more modern priest might have said that I was wrought up emotionally because it was Holy Week and I had nowhere to go to church, and I should wait until I was calmer. But this priest was willing to gather me in any way he could. When I said the part about the infallibility of the Pope, I remember he reached out and laid his hand on my head.
I can't begin to convey to you the dark and frightful images which paraded in front of me as I approached the Church. Every bit of intellectual anti-Catholicism I had been brought up with, every bit of Protestant the Pope is antiChrist stuff which I hadn't but which I must have imbibed from the culture, it all came into my mind again and again. Then there was the contrast between the sedate dark wood Episcopal church, and kneeling at the altar rail for communion, and a daily Eucharist with the Episcopal priest who baptised me, also a professor at my college, with other students and professors from the college, with what seemed to me the garish pastel saints and walking up in a cafeteria style line for communion, and daily mass by various older priests who seemed to be trying to make the English sound like Latin, in the Catholic one. (I had no idea at that point how recently it had been Latin and what a change these priests had been through.) Everything which was foreign and scary about it to me was magnified a thousand fold.
Even after I renounced heresy and schism, and went to confession, where the priest "examined my conscience" according to categories and weightings of sinfulness completely strange to me, and went to my first communion as a Catholic on Holy Thursday, I still had secret thoughts of fleeing once I could do so invisibly. So secret I have hardly ever admitted them. It was only a week later, on retreat at a Benedictine monastery, that the light flooded in, as if I had come to the end of a dark and narrow tunnel and emerged into the bright sun.
I really do think this was spiritual warfare going on.
I can't understand why the story isnt' that it ended as soon as I made my submission or as soon as I received the sacraments, rather than a week later, but I tell the story as it was .
Susan Peterson
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