Vatican II at 50 (Washington Post, National, Oct. 11, 2012):
By Kenneth J. Wolfe
Fifty years ago today the Second Vatican Council began with a clear indication of who had gained control of the Catholic Church’s direction. From the Latin Mass to meatless Fridays to the concept of salvation, numerous components of the faith were set to be reformed, led mostly by clerical academics who had served on preparatory commissions. So powerful were they that Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, a conservative who headed what is now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (which the future Pope Benedict XVI would later lead), was vocally heckled and silenced by his participating colleagues.
As described to journalist Robert Moynihan by Monsignor Brunero Gherardini, who attended the council and lives at the Vatican, Cardinal Ottaviani was addressing the 2,000 assembled bishops in October 1962: “As he speaks, pleading for the bishops to consider the texts the curia has spent three years preparing, suddenly his microphone was shut off. He kept speaking, but no one could hear a word. Then, puzzled and flustered, he stopped speaking, in confusion. And the assembled fathers began to laugh, and then to cheer...” This was on day three. Read more >>
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Rorate contributor in the Washington Post ...
One of the contributors to the Rorate Caeli blog, Kenneth J. Wolfe, has a piece in the national section of the Washington Post (published Oct. 11) on the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. It's remarkable that the Post would publish anything by a Catholic traditionalist, but even more notable that, as of it's publication, it was the third-highest read story on their site. Read here:
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3 comments:
"erase all 16 Vatican II documents and restore the liturgy, teachings and discipline in place before the collapse of all that was considered good and holy in 1962."
A good start.
However, this would imply that there are elements of ecclesial leadership in today's Church who understand the necessity of such actions. Who are they? The current pope? The Curia? Bishops of the first, second or third world? The USCCB? Mark Shea?
Who? Where?
The traditionalist program is as moribund as the dead letters of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." The Church has been sucked into the black hole opened by protestantism and expanded by the blighted theology of its own post-Kantian teachers. It will be well past the lifetimes of everyone reading this blog before she can pull herself out of it.
Flogging the dead horse will not induce it to rise up and dance a gavotte.
Mark Shea! He's got to be THE ONE! MARK SHEA!! YESSSSSS! He's the answer!
Flogging a dead horse... maybe. But God is also in the business of sending revival to unlikely places through unlikely means. That "black hole opened by protestantism," for example, has bequeathed us disbelieving scholarship, but it has also birthed revival movements were a very live Christianity has brought salvation to souls disenfranchised by the Modernist Church. Just saying a sober realism does not necessitate a completely dour outlook. The blighted theology of post-Kantian teachers is undeniable. But so is a surprising insistence on traditional morality and core doctrines, thankfully. Any safe port in a storm...
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