SELECTIONS BY PAULY FONGEMIE
Protestant Pressures
The 450th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation was celebrated in Wittenberg on 31 October 1967. A number of Catholic representatives joined a thousand Protestant delegates from all over the world to pay tribute to Martin Luther. A personal representative of Cardinal Bea, from his unity Secretariat, found it "difficult to hold a continuous conversation, so frequently must he shake another evangelical hand." [The Tablet, Nov. 11, 1967, p. 1173] One of the Lutheran observers at the Second Vatican Council, Dr. K. E. Skydsgaard, "spoke of the way in which the Second Vatican Council seemed in many ways to have brought the Catholic Church very close to the Protestant Churches." [Ibid.] Mention has already been made of the extent to which this is clearly the opinion of the Protestants who provided commentaries for the conciliar documents in the Abbott edition. Similar expressions have been made elsewhere. Archdeacon Pawley, an Anglican observer, finds that "the 'dialogue' envisaged by the Decree on Ecumenism and encouraged by Pope Paul VI has exceeded the wildest hopes entertained for it." [Rome and Canterbury Through Four Centuries, B. & M. Pawley, London, 1974, p. 353] He remarks, with great satisfaction, "The true picture of the Council was that it represented a powerful victory of the forces of renewal in the Church of Rome over the conservative immobilism of its central government." [Ibid., p. 351] Pastor Roger Schutz, the prior and founder of the Protestant community at Taize, also an observer at Vatican II, stated that the council had "exceeded our hopes." [The Tablet, March 2, 1963, p. 236]
A report in The Tablet in February 1966 included the following:
The Council's statement on the Catholic Church's understanding of itself was an answer to Luther's basic concerns that was late in point of time but close as far as content was concerned, said the German Evangelical theologian Professor Peter Meinhold of Kiel in Stuttgart last week. In the Second Vatican Council, with its fundamental explorations and practical reforms, he saw the honoring of Reformation demands in a way no one would have dared hope up till now. Comparing statements from the Council's Constitution on the Church with Luther's theology, he demonstrated that in their basic concerns the two were in surprising agreement over long passages. This showed the extent to which the Churches had overcome their past and come closer to each other without betraying themselves. [The Tablet, Feb. 5, 1966, p. 171]
This final sentence is inaccurate as it is the Catholic Church which has made a unilateral move towards the Protestant denominations. This movement still remains entirely one-sided and consists of what Protestant leaders consider as the Church of Rome "seeing the light" at last. Some Protestant spokesmen have been commendably honest in making their own position clear. Dr. Skydsgaard who had found it unbelievable a few years before that the "Roman Church" would ever change, was full of praise for the Council during its Second Session but warned that it would be an illusion for Catholics to imagine that any number of Protestants "looked upon the Roman Catholic Church with 'nostalgia' or desired to 'return' pure and simple to the bosom of a Church which they still regarded as defective. The Churches must sit down and talk over their differences as 'equals' and as 'equals' again to be reunited." [The Second Session, X, Rynne, London, 1964, p. 273]
Professor George Lindbeck, of the Yale Divinity School, and Lutheran observer, was happy to note that: "The Council marked the end of the Counter-Reformation." He expressed his satisfaction at "the rejection of the proposed schema on the sources of revelation as well as the results of the discussion on the liturgy." [The Tablet, Feb. 16, 1963, p. 177] Catholic traditionalists must concur, however regretfully, that the Council certainly did mark the end of the Counter-Reformation. The Counter-Reformation initiated what is possibly the greatest era of true renewal in the entire history of the Church. Every true renewal in Church history has a common characteristic, the emergence of great Saints.
... The very presence of Protestant observers at the Council was bound to have an inhibiting effect upon the debates. No good mannered host would wish to express opinions which might offend a guest in his house if he could help doing so. It is obvious that the presence of these Protestant observers with whom the Council Fathers mixed freely, and with whom many established friendly personal relations, must certainly have resulted in some Fathers minimizing or even passing over in silence aspects of the Faith which might cause offence to their Protestant guests. The testimonies of some Council Fathers that this was definitely happening have already been cited in Chapter VI. Archbishop Lefebvre issued a warning about this tendency as early as March 1963. [Un Eveque Parle, Mgr. M. Lefebvre, Paris, 1974 p. 26] An English version of Mgr. Lefebvre's book is available. In October 1964 he complained that: "Thus, on those points of specifically Catholic doctrine, one is forced to compose schemes which attenuate or even completely banish anything which could displease the Orthodox and, above all, the Protestants." [p. 111] As is so often the case, Mgr. Lefebvre's judgment is confirmed by someone speaking from the opposite standpoint. Dr. Moorman, leader of the Anglican delegation, noted that the observers "were providing some kind of check on what was being said. Every bishop who has stood up to speak has known that, in the tribune of S. Longinus was a group of intelligent and critical people, their pencils and biros poised to take down what he said and possibly use it in evidence against him and his colleagues on some future occasion ... Members of the Council tended, therefore, to be very sensitive to what the representatives of those other communions were thinking, and did their best to avoid saying anything which was likely to cause offence. If some Father forgot himself and said things which were bound to cause a flutter in the observers' tribune, he was sometimes rebuked by some later speaker." [Vatican Observed, J Moorman, London, 1967, p. 26] Protestant influence did not consist only in this inhibiting effect upon what the Fathers said; they were sometimes able to have their own views put forward in the debates. Dr. Moorman reveals that: "although the observers were not allowed to speak in the Council, their speeches were sometimes made for them by one or other of the Fathers." [p. 28] The observers were able to "make their views known at special weekly meetings of the (Unity) Secretariat, and had personal contacts with the Council Fathers, periti, and other leading personalities in Rome." [Wiltgen, p. 123] Professor Oscar Cullmann, a Lutheran delegate, remarked after only six weeks: "I am more and more amazed every morning at the way we really form a part of the Council." [Wiltgen, p. 124
... The most obvious result of Vatican II is, as Fr. Bryan Houghton pointed out in the June 1975 issue of Christian Order, that the Catholic Church is now "the talking Church." Before the Council she devoted her efforts to the serious business of evangelization, now she talks about it. To a very large extent her leaders have substituted ecumenism for evangelization as their first priority, particularly in the western countries.
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