In our attempt to get a clear understanding of how we
arrived at the present crisis of faith, it is instructive to examine the
experience of another council peritus, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, theologian,
Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, gloriously elevated
by the Holy Spirit to the Chair of St. Peter as Pope Benedict XVI in April,
2005. By way of background, from 1930-1950 in response to the pervasive
secularism of these years in Europe , a broad
intellectual and theological movement emerged among prominent European
theologians, among them Frs. Romano Guardini, Karl Adam, Henri de Lubac, Jean
Danielou, Yves Congar, Louis Boyer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The inspiration
for this movement was a belief that the Catholic Faith had to speak more
effectively to the modern world, and that to do this a rediscovery of all of
the riches of the two-thousand year tradition of the Church was a crucial step.
These reform-minded theologians saw that the precursor
to any aggiornamento (the famous “updating,” one purpose for which John
XXIII convened the Council) must be a ressourcement, a restoration of
this tradition, a “return to the sources” of the Catholic Faith. The writings
of these reformers played a profound role in influencing the direction the
Council was to take, and were a formative influence on two periti,
Archbishop Wojtyla and Fr. Ratzinger. These priests hoped for a return to
classical (patristic-medieval) sources, a renewed interpretation of Aquinas,
and a dialogue with the major movements and thinkers of the twentieth century,
with particular attention given to problems associated with the Enlightenment,
modernity, and liberalism. Fr. Ratzinger in 1964 was included among the
founders of a new international theological journal, Concilium, along
with other notables Frs. Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Johann
Baptist Metz, Yves Congar and Gustavo Gutierrez – at the time, the elite of the
more progressive Catholic theologians. At present Concilium exists
….to promote theological discussion in the
spirit of Vatican II [emphasis added], out
of which it was born. It is a catholic journal in the widest sense: rooted
firmly in the Catholic heritage, open to other Christian traditions and the
world's faiths.
When asked by Vittorio Messori in his famous interview
with Cardinal Ratzinger about the fact that he once was associated with some
theologians who have since run afoul with the CDF, the Cardinal’s reply sheds
much light on this “spirit of Vatican II”:
It is not I who have
changed, but others. At our very first meetings I pointed out two prerequisites
to my colleagues. The first one: our group must not lapse into any kind of
sectarianism or arrogance, as if we were the new, the true Church, an alternative
magisterium [emphasis added] with a monopoly on the truth of Christianity.
The second one: discussion has to be conducted without any individualistic
flights forward, in confrontation with the reality of Vatican II with the true
letter and the true spirit of the Council, not with an imaginary Vatican III.
These prerequisites were increasingly less observed in the following period up
to a turning point—which set in around 1973—when someone began to assert that the texts
of Vatican II were no longer the point of reference for Catholic theology ….that
the Council still belonged to the traditional, clerical moment of the Church
and that it was not possible to move forward very much with such documents
[emphasis added]. They must be surpassed.
It is
important to understand the part played by neomodernism in bringing about this
division within the ranks of the “new theology.” As I hope to show, it was the establishment
of “an alternative magisterium” on the part of theologians who viewed
the Vatican II documents as inadequate who demonstrated the pride warned
against by Cardinal Ratzinger. I believe it consistent with Catholic teaching to see in the apostasy of this
“anthropocentric society” the work of “the hidden enemy who sows errors
and misfortune in human history.”
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