The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

Another From the Mail Bag...

August 31st, 2006

I received this e-mail yesterday and it asks some interesting questions to which I responded privately:

Hi Your Excellency,

This is your northern correspondent. Instead of bothering you by phone, I thought I'd pester you by email. Cardinal Ratzinger's words:

The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. *The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma
at all*, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the
rest. (...) All this leads a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling people. The one way
in which Vatican II can be made plausible is to present it as it is; one part of the unbroken, the unique Tradition of the Church and of her faith.

Does this mean that VII could contain error if it didn't define dogma? I don't think so, because all the bishops together, etc., etc., could not give error, right? Well, then, how do we reconcile the 'seeming' 'flat-out' contradictions in VII?

By the by, are you seeking to be reconciled (is that the right term) with Benedict?

Thanks for all the wonderful articles,

God Bless You,

Good Morning X - thanks for the good questions !

Ratzinger has always maintained that the correct way to see Vatican II is in the light of Tradition. He correctly identifies two extremes:

1/ Those who see Vatican II as a rupture with the past - a free-for-all for liberals to advance all sorts of wackiness
2/ Those who see Vatican II as a corruption of the past and hence to be rejected - Tissier's "tabula rasa"

That's why he says "we need to save the council from Lefebvre" because even in 1988 he could see accepting the council "in the light of Tradition" had two completely different meanings for Ratzinger who had negotiated the deal and Lefebvre who signed it.

I don't think Ratzinger means the Council taught error per se, but per accidens. That means the error that exists is only an apparent error that needs (as he now puts it) a "new hermeneutic". Quite obviously from a trad viewpoint these contradictions are slightly more than apparent, but I have attempted to raise some important theological qualifications which to some degree coalesce with Ratzinger's take on things:

1/ It is clear the entire body of bishops cannot teach error in an Ecumenical council
2/ Ratzinger maintains no new teaching was defined by VII - but Religious liberty was taught and that was contradicted by previous Magisterium
3/ The previous Magisterial pronouncements, however, were not (according to Fessler) infallible and hence per se capable of being reformed.

I think on this question we are all going to have to wait and see what the "new hermeneutic" looks like if it ever shows up at all. I think "hermeneutic" will turn out to be just a new "spin" on the old gobbledygook and we'll all end up with a headache !

As to reconciling with Benedict - obviously everyone keeps asking me that - I refer you to the April 29th column http://www.olfatima.com/April%2029%202006.html in which I wrote in part:

One final riposte: to the question: If you keep writing about how the SSPX position is "wrong" and the sede position is absurd and the way to go is to unite with uniting with Rome, then may I ask why haven't you done so?

Like Beckett's Waiting for Godot whose eponymous (one of my really favorite words) hero never shows up, we're still waiting for the Pope's Motu proprio to see what it contains. Like Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons waiting for the text of Henry VIII's Oath of Supremacy, "It depends upon the words... if it is possible for me to swear it, I'll swear it !"

So far (as we both concluded) Benedict XVI hasn't done anything for Traditionalists so the question is moot at present.

+TF