The post-Vatican II civil war 
Joseph Ratzinger pictured in 1962, while serving as a theological adviser at Vatican II
In his new book, The Irony of Modern Catholic History , George Weigel traces the root of debates at
the recent Amazon synod to a fracture within reformist theologians at
the Second Vatican Council.
Lionel: Not true.
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Although the drama of Catholicism and modernity is often described in
terms of a battle between traditionalists and modernisers, it is more
accurate to think of it as a three-way contest between those committed
to resisting modernity in all its forms, those seeking an accommodation
with modernity because they believe it has made classic Christian truth
claims and practices implausible if not false, and those seeking to
convert modernity by placing its noblest aspirations on a firmer,
Christ-centred foundation.”
Lionel: Vatican Council II interpreted without a false premise is traditional. It supports the past exclusivist ecclesiology and the Syllabus of Errors.
We simply have to look at LG 8, LG 14 and LG 16 as hypothetical and theoretical. Then there is no rupture with the past ecclesiology and Feeneyite extra ecclesiam nulla salus(EENS).
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The fault lines among these positions were evident throughout Vatican
II and led to one of the most significant ruptures of the
post-conciliar years.
Lionel: The fault was there in the Letter of the Holy Office(LOHO) 1949 to the Archbishop of Boston, Richard Cushing relative to Fr. Leonard Feeney and the St.Benedict Center.The Letter (LOHO) assumed being saved in invincible ignorance and the case of the unknown catechumen were practical exceptions to traditional EENS. The error was repeated in Vatican Council II. Lumen Gentium 16( invincible ignorance) and Lumen Gentium 14( case of the unknown catechumen saved without the baptism of water) were interpreted by Cardinal Ratzinger as being literal exceptions to 16th century EENS. The error can be read in two papers of the International Theological Commission, Vatican.
So Ad Gentes 7 and Lumen Gentium 14 mention exclusive salvation and invincible ignorance and also the baptism of desire are mentioned since they were mistaken to be exceptions to EENS in the LOHO.
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That split, which was not without its rhetorical
sharp edges, was not between the pro-reform conciliar theologians and
the rejectionist camp of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his
traditionalist followers, but within the group of theologians who had
set the intellectual table for the Council and who had the greatest
influence on Vatican II’s work. It was not, in other words, a war
between diametrically opposed theological camps, of the sort that had
resulted in Humani Generis. It was a civil war within the reformist
camp.
Lionel: Wrong. Archbishop Lefebvre had overlooked the mistake in LOHO as did Pope Pius XII. He then overlooked the same mistake in Vatican Council II. The bishops of the Society of St.Pius X still interpret LG 8, LG 14, LG 16 etc as exceptions to the past ecclesiology of the Catholic Church.
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The occasion for difference to become division, and then chasm,
involved the establishment of a new theological journal. Its very name,
Concilium, telegraphed its intent: it was to be a journal of and by the
reformist conciliar theologians who had come under Holy Office scrutiny
in the 1950s but were being vindicated as periti (theological advisers)
at Vatican II.
Lionel: The Holy Office in the 1950's was made up of liberal cardinals.LOHO used a false premise to do away with the traditional interpretation of EENS. There was no correction from Cardinal Ottaviani or the other cardinals.They criticized Fr. Leonard Feeney.
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The first co-editors of the new journal were two of the most
prominent theological reformists of the era: the German Jesuit Karl
Rahner and the Flemish Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx. Rahner and
Schillebeeckx were eager to engage their fellow reformist periti in the
Concilium project, and among those they recruited was the French Jesuit
Henri de Lubac, the most venerable of the reformers and a man who had
suffered considerably during the theological chill of the late Pius XII
years. So in November 1963, towards the end of the Council’s second
period, de Lubac accepted Rahner’s invitation to participate in
Concilium. Less than a year later, in October 1964, de Lubac wrote to
Rahner expressing concerns about the direction the new journal might
take.
Lionel: So what ? Vatican Council II can still be interpreted without their false premise. The Council then supports a St.Teresa of Avila's understanding of Lutherans and other Christian denominations, and an ecumenism of return.
Without the Rahner-Ratzinger false premise, there is nothing in Unitatits Redintigratio( Decree on Ecumenism),Vatican Council II to contradict the past ecumenism of return.
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Like other ecclesiastical meetings, Vatican II had an important “Off
Broadway” dimension. Lectures, seminars and discussions among bishops,
theologians and other interested parties were held outside the Council
aula in St Peter’s Basilica, and what happened Off Broadway could make a
significant impact within the Council debates themselves. One of the
most important venues for these extramural discussions was the Dutch
Documentation Centre, where Fr Schillebeeckx gave a lecture floating the
idea that the world had always been “Christian” in some sense and that
divine revelation had made that tacit Christianity explicit.
Lionel: They all maintained the false narrative on Vatican Council II with the support of Pope Paul VI and the Holy Office.
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As he recorded in his Council journal, de Lubac thought any such
notion was “a betrayal of the Gospel” and told Rahner that, if this were
to be the line Concilium would follow, he could not be identified with
the new journal. Rahner (who would later pen an influential and highly
controversial essay on “Anonymous Christians”) assured his Jesuit
confrere that Schillebeeckx was speaking for himself only, and that his
was only one view among the many that Concilium would entertain.
Lionel: We now know that there can be no known salvation outside the Catholic Church. We cannot meet or see someone saved without faith and the baptism of water. There are no known cases of non Catholics saved outside the Church (1965-2019). So there is no basis for the new theology. It is based upon there being known salvation outside the Church. So there are exceptions to EENS. Since there were exceptions to EENS, Rayner floated his concept of the Anonymous Christian and Pope Benedict would extend it to the Anonymous Christian Jew, who did not need to convert into the Church as a member, for salvation.
Pope Benedict does not give up.
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De Lubac was temporarily reassured. But seven months later, on May
24, 1965 (ie during the period between Vatican II’s third and fourth
sessions), he wrote to Rahner again, stating that the first five issues
of the new journal had not relieved his concerns, that he believed
Concilium had become a “propaganda tool in the service of an extremist
school” pretending it was “in line with the Council”, and that he was,
therefore, resigning quietly from the journal’s editorial committee. It
was the first skirmish in what would become a theological “War of the
Conciliar Succession” in the post-Vatican II years.
De Lubac was not the only Council theologian who believed that other
theologians, during and after Vatican II, were going so far in their
embrace of intellectual modernity that they were emptying Catholicism of
its doctrinal content and betraying John XXIII’s evangelical intention
for the Council. Their opponents, of course, denied this charge and
claimed they were the true heirs of the “spirit” of Vatican II, which
they often defined by reference to a selective set of quotations from
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia [John XXIII’s opening address to the Council].
Lionel: Pope John XXIII also ignored the error in the LOHO.
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In 1969, de Lubac, the French Oratorian Louis Bouyer, the Chilean
Jorge Medina Estévez, and the German Joseph Ratzinger agreed to meet
during the first session in Rome of the International Theological
Commission, an advisory body to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, as Paul VI had renamed the old Holy Office.
Lionel:Two theological papers of the ITC interpret hypothetical cases as being non hypothetical and objective exceptions to the past ecclesiology and exclusive salvation. This was an objective error. It is a violation of the Principle of Non Contradiction. How can un-known people now in Heaven be known exceptions to EENS on earth? Where are the objective case?
This was a factual mistake.Yet Fr. Rahner placed LOHO in the Denzinger.
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At a meeting
arranged and led by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, they
dis- cussed the possibility of a new theological journal that would
challenge the intellectual hegemony enjoyed by Concilium and the
theologians associated with it. They chose the name Communio, Ratzinger
later recalled, because the Latin word for “communion” connoted a
“harmonious coexistence of unity and difference” that stood in contrast
to the ideologically straitened perspective of Concilium.
The name Communio would also challenge the appropriation of the term
“communion” by Catholic progressives who were using it to de-emphasise
the vertical or transcendent dimension of the Church in favour of a
horizontal, populist Church that functioned more like a political party
than a community of disciples in mission.
The “communion” of the Church, these new theological dissidents
insisted, had to be understood in reference to the Holy Trinity, a
dynamic communion of self-giving love and receptivity. Absent that
tether, the communio of the Church would be understood in merely mundane
or sociological terms, and the Church would become a voluntary
organisation with religious interests.
That Trinitarian communion – God’s own life – was made known to
humanity through Jesus Christ, so the authentic renewal of theology in
and for the Church, and for the conversion of the world, had to be
Christocentric as well as Trinitarian. That meant, in turn, that the
Bible had a privileged place
in Catholic theological reflection and in the renewal of Catholic
pastoral practice. For in the scriptural Word of God the Church
continued to ponder the full mystery of the incarnate Word of God, Jesus
Christ. And to be “engrossed in God’s speech”, Ratzinger later noted,
was to be missionary: reaching out to an increasingly pagan developed
world that nonetheless manifested a thirst for the divine, even if it
tried to quench that thirst by drinking from the wells of many false
gods.
Perhaps above all, the Communio theologians would “read” Vatican II
through the prism of the entire Catholic tradition – including Vatican I
– and would thereby challenge the sometimes tacit and sometimes
explicit notion among the Concilium theologians that Vatican II marked a
rupture with the past. To undertake that kind of reading of Vatican II
meant engaging in an open conversation, not one based on certain
ideological admission tickets.
The conversation had to be international, so that cultures mutually
enriched each other. And the conversation had to be a creative
enterprise, not one that simply repeated formulas from the past as if
Catholic tradition had been frozen for all time in a syllabus of
propositions.
Over the post-conciliar years, the polemics between the Concilium and
Communio theologians sometimes displayed the nasty odium theologicum
that had marred intra-theological debates in the past since at least the
First Council of Nicaea in 325 (during which St Nicholas of Myra, who
would eventually become “Old St Nick”, or Santa Claus, was said to have
thrown a punch at the theologian Arius, whom he deemed a heretic). This
ferocity was not altogether surprising: the Concilium-oriented thinkers
had achieved a great deal of power over Catholic intellectual life,
enjoyed exercising it, and resented a challenge from those who had once
been allies, while the Communio theologians chafed at the hegemony of
their former compatriots.
Lionel: George Weigel also interprets Vatican Council II with the false premise, like the Communion theologians.
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By the 21st century, however, Communio was being published in 15
languages, and perhaps even some of the Concilium theologians recognised
how much the journal they resented had contributed to the
diversification of methods and perspectives within Catholic theology –
precisely what all reformist theologians had demanded when they were
under Roman scrutiny in the 1950s.
Moreover, and more importantly for this drama, the Communio challenge
helped bring about the next two acts in the drama of Catholicism and
modernity by embodying the possibility of a third option for the
Church’s third millennium: neither a Catholic surrender to modernity nor
a flat-out rejection of modernity, but the conversion of modernity,
beginning with a critique from within modern intellectual premises.
Lionel. Pope Benedict sees the Church as Communion but this should not contradict seeing the Church still, as the only Ark of Noah that saves in the flood.-Lionel Andrades
https://catholicherald.co.uk/magazine/the-post-vatican-ii-civil-war/
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