Surprise! No Vatican III!
The recent session of the
Synod on the Family has been likened not a few times by commentators as an
attempt at a mini-Vatican III. And this
appellation has some validity, for the past year or more has seen the
re-appearance of such personages as Hans Küng (albeit not in vigorous form), Gustavo Gutierrez, and, at least in spirit,
Karl Rahner, and, in the flesh, the indefagitable
Cardinal Kasper, all examples of those who seemed to be disappointed that Vatican
III did not follow closely after Vatican II to accomplish unfinished business:
to get the Church firmly on the same tracks as the choo-choo train of
post-Enlightenment, modern, and post-modern secularism, whose fuel is
anti-dogmatism and radical individualism.
It would seem that Kasper
and his cohorts—and Kasper certainly believed that the Pope supported
them—thought that while there might have been some bumps in the road, what they
wanted in terms of changing pastoral practice with respect to divorced and
remarried Catholics and with respect to civil unions and gay unions would in
the end win over the day. On what did they base their
optimism? Perhaps their cockeyed optimism was based to
some extent on their belief that they had Pope Francis behind them. But even if
this were not true, they were banking on the tactics used at the Second Vatican
Council where the major fruits of that Council were brought about by the
cleverness of the “stage-managers”, those in charge of procedural matters, who
gleefully spoke about their accomplishments after the Council. And once those fruits had been incorporated
into official documents with built-in ambiguity, they were disseminated through
a press that at that time—like the press of every time—rejoices in the thought
that the Catholic Church has seen the light of the modern liberal world. Those of us who are of a certain age remember
the series of articles in the New Yorker during
Vatican II that were written by a priest who signed himself as Xavier Rynne, a
classy pseudonym for a Redemptorist priest who carefully filtered what was
going on at the Council through his own lens, a lens that would refract the
facts in a way he knew would please the readership of that sophisticated and
worldly periodical. He is credited with first
using the terms “conservative” and ”liberal” to define those opposing forces in
the Church that were evident in the debates. That is not
a good legacy to leave behind.
So it seemed evident to
Kasper et al. that they could do the same sort of
thing with the Synod. They had the
stage-managers, but they turned out not to be as zealous and crafty as those at
what Cardinal Marx called “the Council”. But there are three important differences between
the Church and the world of 1968 and that of 2014, that they did not take into
account, and they did not do so because of their severe myopia that shuts out
reality, even within the Church.
The first differentiating
factor is that most of the bishops and Cardinals present at the Synod were the offspring of St. John Paul II. They were molded in the image of the Polish
Pope who was determined to return, after the post-conciliar confusion, to
doctrinal continuity and to clear teaching, at least on the part of the Papacy,
within the Church, a task that was co-shouldered by his Prefect for the
Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Joseph Ratzinger. The stage-managers and Kasper himself, through
their peculiar vision of reality, assumed that the bishops were all chafing
under the stern hands of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and were just waiting
for an opportunity to show their true Council Colors and finish what Vatican II
had started. But in many cases, perhaps even most cases, that was obviously not
true. Many of these men really believe in the teaching of the Church as
embodied in her Tradition. And they pushed back, and hard. But, as has been correctly pointed out by a number of
commentators on the Synod, there remains the depressing fact that over 50
percent of the bishops did not stand up to the attempt to change Church
teaching by the pastoral back door.
The second factor that the
managers failed to take account of is the ubiquitous presence today of the
Internet. Gone are the days when secrecy could be strictly imposed by edict,
when information could be meted out in carefully controlled dribbles, when one
had to wait for days or even weeks to find out what is going on. We certainly know that the Internet is used all
too often negatively for reprehensible purposes. But it is
also the source of instantaneous information and seemingly endless debate about
every issue under the sun. We did not have to wait for
the next issue of the New Yorker to let sophisticated
men and women know, even Catholics, what is really going on at Councils and Synods. The Internet is also making the Vatican Press
Office more and more irrelevant except as where one hears the particular spin
that those in charge want to put on a piece of information.
The other differentiating
factor is less obvious to many Catholics, for most Catholics live in a
post-conciliar world that assumes that whatever happened in the years after “the Council”, including and especially the
liturgical life of the Church, must be the will of God, an attitude engendered
by the ever-encroaching growth of hyper-papalism that exceeds even the
Ultramontanist dreams of Cardinal Manning in the 19th century,
and by the long standing tradition of a non-thinking laity. This second factor is that most young priests
and most young men who are in seminary today, and most young women and men who
are in the Religious Orders that are growing, want to know and love the
Tradition ever more deeply. They are
quite different from the priests who were ready to adopt every
(non-Council-mandated) liturgical change of the post-conciliar era. They would never tear down reredoses and high
altars. They would never rip out communion rails. They long
for something to sing at Mass that is not some sappy retread of 1970s
sacro-pop. And—this is the heart of the matter—so many of
them have discovered the Traditional Roman Rite of Mass, a.k.a. the
Extraordinary Form. Bugnini says somewhere that
to complete the liturgical revolution the Traditional Mass had to be blotted
out for two whole generations. That did not
happen, thanks to Benedict XVI.
The rediscovery of Catholic
Tradition by young priests and by young men and women as a whole especially by
means of the Traditional Mass and by the beauty in art, architecture and music
that it gave birth to has gone nearly unnoticed by not only those of Kasper’s
generation and their contemporary stage-managers but also by the great majority
of ordinary Catholics, who have been kept in a time bubble for the past fifty
years. But it is real, and it is there, and this despite
opposition from bishops who are willfully blind to the power of the Traditional
Mass and its necessary role in the New Evangelization of the Church and of the
world. This is not, as detractors would have us
believe, mere aestheticism or romanticism or conservatism. For a love for the Tradition always gets down
to the bed-rock of doctrine, praxis and faith, gets down to a real love for the
person of Jesus Christ that then enables the person, priest or lay, to practice
his faith with love and mercy towards his neighbor.
Cardinal Burke celebrated a
Pontifical Solemn Mass in the Traditional Latin Rite in St. Peter’s just last
week on October 25 as part of the Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage. There are photos of the Mass on many sites
on the Internet. I suggest that everyone look at those photos. You will see so many young priests and
seminarians present, some serving the Mass. The choir
that sang the chant for the Mass was made up of seminarians from the North
American College, which is quasi-amazing. These
priests and seminarians have found a pearl of great price and, with the help of
God, they will give all that they have to make that pearl their own in their
ministry in the Catholic Church.
***
The Traditional Mass cannot be
stage-managed. This is the heart of the opposition to it among
bishops, especially in Europe. It is Tradition itself that manages
the Mass of the Ages, and whoever celebrates this Mass, Cardinal, bishop or
priest, must submit himself to the Mass, must submit himself to the Sacrifice
that he is offering, and in that submission realizes his ministry as a priest
of God.
Fr. Richard G. Cipolla, DPhil
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