(The following article is from the Latin Mass Society website
and gives an insight into the ongoing confusion in the Catholic church. BLL)
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
If the good guys win at the Synod
One thing to remember about it is that the terrible things which happened after the Council came after the promulgation of documents which had been much tweaked in a conservative direction, documents which the more conservative bishops felt they could, after all, support, since they were quite capable of being read in a way consistent with traditional views. For example, it was quite late in the proceedings that one famous sentence of the document on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, assumed its final form:
'there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them'
with the addition of the phrase 'genuinly and certainly', 'vera et certa'. With this in the document, what more could anyone ask?
All sorts of qualifying footnotes and subclauses went into the documents
of the Council to acheive the consensus votes which were thought to be
appropriate - and rightly so. But the disasters which befell the Church
afterwards still happened.
Before anyone says that it was all wonderful, wonderful, wonderful after
the Council, and only curmugeonly traddies like me think differently,
let me just quote our three post-Conciliar Popes on the subject (not
counting JP I).
Bl. Pope Paul VI: This
state of uncertainty even holds sway in the Church. There was the
belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the
history of the Church. Instead, it is the arrival of a day of clouds,
of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty.
Pope St John Paul II: I
would like to ask forgiveness-in my own name and in the name of all of
you, venerable and dear brothers in the episcopate-for everything which,
for whatever reason, through whatever human weakness, impatience or
negligence, and also through the at times partial, one-sided and
erroneous application of the directives of the Second Vatican Council,
may have caused scandal and disturbance concerning the interpretation of
the doctrine and the veneration due to this great sacrament.
Pope Benedict XVI: in
many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the
new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or
even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the
liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I
too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion.
And I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep
pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.
I would strongly suggest to all Catholics that, if the conservatives at the Synod declare victory, we should congratulate them heartily, and then start digging an air-raid shelter in the garden.
One thing we have to understand is the way liberals read documents. Their scriptural exegesis illustrates the point. They don't read a whole passage or letter or whatever and come to a balanced view of what points are being made there - that would be boring. Instead, they take a bit they like, and instead of reading it in the context of the rest, they use it as an 'interpretive key' of the rest: they read, or ignore, the rest of the document through that one passage. Usually it is an isolated sentence, or even a stray phrase. Thus, they see St Paul's words 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female', (Galatians 3:28), and instead of asking what, in context, he meant by that, they take it as meaning what they want it to mean, which today is something approaching gender theory, and proceed to interpret, or ignore, everything else St Paul wrote to fit their weird understanding of that one phrase. So despite everything St Paul says, at length and with great emphasis, about the differences between the sexes, liberals will quote this phrase to show that female ordination is demanded by Scripture. Nothing else St Paul wrote makes any difference, because it all needs to be understood through this 'key'.
The 'Spirit of Vatican II' works in a similar way. The argument here is that, again looking at an isolated passage in a particular document, the Council moved the Church from being in favour (for example) of traditional religious dress with all the trimmings, or a completely Latin liturgy, to the point at which we are asked to consider if all the trimmings are appropriate to modern conditions, or to consider the use of the vernacular for some parts of the Mass. What we need to take from the Council, the liberals claimed, is not the document's final, stated, position - habits and Latin should emphatically be retained - but the direction of movement. It is therefore a matter of 'obedience to the Council' to continue that movement: it is obedient to the Council, in fact, to violate the Council's clear words, and jettison habits, and Latin, altogether. To insist on what the Council actually said is to disobey the Council.
Conservatives were at a huge disadvantage in debating the meaning of such texts with liberals, because they wanted to adopt a balanced and docile position which drew from the documents whatever might be of value in them. They felt obliged to go along with a huge amount of very disruptive and damaging changes in the hope that they would have good results - which of course they might have had, at least in many cases, if they had stopped there - which merely conceded to the liberals a good half of what they wanted. It was then far harder to resist the further changes which the liberals undertook under cover of the confusion and controversy. The conservatives did the liberals' work for them by overcoming the inertia inherant in any stable institution, getting the ball rolling, by an often ham-fisted authoritarianism.
With hindsight, it would have been better to say that, since the Council's comments on these and many other matters were nothing more than recommendations on matters of prudential judgement, the vast can of worms they offered to open should remain closed until a more auspicious moment presented itself.
With the Synod on the Family, that won't be an option in the same way, but the liberals' ability to snatch victory from the jaws of stalemate is undiminished. The very fact that the issues are being debated is a huge gain for the liberal side of the argument. The very fact that certain frankly disedifying statements from the bishops' interventions are being quoted in the press - accurately or not - moves the debate immeasurably in their favour.
I read today that one bishop thought the 'language of indissolubility' needs to be changed. Words fail me. That this should be said at a Synod in Rome undermines the certainty of doctrine which has, on this topic, survived in the public perception of the Church. That certainty, in public perception, is of immense value. Take that away, and all hell breaks loose.
If the good guys win at the Synod, the liberals will still win. If the good guys clearly and publicly lose, then the results will immediate and catastrophic. I expect, however, that some formula will be found to maintain a consensus, a formula which could be seen as a victory for the conservatives, at least by comparison with the demands of some of the liberals. The point is, this will still be a victory for the liberals. They will take the concessions made to them, they will act as if they won twice as much, and they will be back for more.
I don't believe in an inevitable victory for the liberal side of the debate in the long term - quite the contrary - but the Synod, like Vatican II, has brought together a balance of forces which is clearly not going to conclude with a triumphant reassertion of the traditional view. Things are going to get worse, a lot worse, before they get better.
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