SELECTIONS BY PAULY FONGEMIE
Pope John Is Inspired
There is, of course, no obligation for any Catholic to believe that Pope John's inspiration came from God. There is no doubt that he was a good and holy pope who may possibly be canonized - but those familiar with the lives of the Saints also know that it is often to the most saintly members of the Church that Satan addresses his most subtle temptations.
In a pastoral letter addressed to his clergy in 1870, explaining the background to the events at the First Vatican Council, Cardinal Manning quoted with approval the words of Cardinal Pallavicini that:
...to convoke a General Council except when absolutely demanded by necessity, is to tempt God.
He later adds that:
Each several Council was convened to extinguish the chief heresy, or to correct the chief evil, of the time.
Cardinal Manning had made the same point in an earlier pastoral and explained that:
The first six were convened to condemn heresies, the seventh to condemn the Iconoclasts, the eighth for the cause of Photius, the ninth for the recovery of the Holy Land, the tenth against the claims of anti-popes, the eleventh against the Waldenses, the twelfth against heresies and for the Holy Land, the thirteenth against the usurpation of the Emperor Frederick II, the fourteenth against the errors of the Greeks, the fifteenth against various heresies, the sixteenth for the reunion of the East, the seventeenth for the healing of schisms and for questions of public law, the eighteenth against the great Lutheran heresy, and for the correction of moral evils.
There can be no doubt at all that atheistic Communism is the chief evil of our own time but it is an evil which the Council made a particular point of not condemning. This is a paradox which will be examined in detail in Chapter XI. [Emphasis in bold added by the Web Master.]
Needless to say, no matter what the source of inspiration for the Council, once it had been convoked the Holy Ghost would, at the very least, have prevented it from teaching formal heresy in its officially promulgated documents. Perhaps the influence of the Holy Ghost is most manifest in the fact that the Council differed from its predecessors by being "pastoral" in nature and in promulgating no infallible doctrinal or moral teaching to be held by the Church. The status of the conciliar documents will be examined in Chapter XIV. As will be made clear in this chapter, the fact that these documents contain no formal heresy by no means implies that they invariably explain the faith in the clearest possible manner or that, indeed, it might not have been far better had the Council never been convoked.
A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos - "By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit" (Mt. 7:16-19). No rational person can deny that up to the present Vatican II has produced no good fruits. The reforms enacted in its name, according to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, "have contributed and are still contributing to the demolition of the Church, the ruin of the priesthood, the destruction of the Sacrifice and the Sacraments, the disappearance of religious life, as well as to the emergence of a naturalist and Teilhardian doctrine in universities, seminaries, the religious education of children - a teaching born of Liberalism and Protestantism, and condemned many times by the solemn Magisterium of the Church."
Even Pope Paul now speaks in very different terms from those of his opening address to the Second Session. By 1968 he had reached the stage of lamenting the fact that the Church was engaged in a process of self-destruction (autodistruzione). [Declaration of November 21, 1974] On the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, 1972, he went as far as saying that somehow or other Satan himself had found an opening into the Church, where he was spreading doubt, disquiet, and dissatisfaction to the extent that any profane prophet giving vent to his views in a newspaper is listened to with greater care than the Church. "We thought," he complained, "that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the Church; instead we found new storms. There is uncertainty; people seek to open gulfs rather than to bridge them. How did this happen? We will confide this thought to you - that there was an adverse power, the Devil, whom the Gospel calls the mysterious enemy of man, something preternatural which came to suffocate the fruits of the Vatican Council."
This judgment by the Pope provides a striking justification of an assessment made by James Hitchcock, a disil- lusioned liberal professor, in a book first published in 1971:
There are many curiosities in the history of the Church in the postconciliar years, and not the least is the fact that so few progressives have noticed the extent to which the reactionaries' predictions prior to the Council have been proven correct and that their own expectations have been contradicted. They continue to treat the conservatives as ignorant, prejudiced, and out of touch with reality.
Yet the progressives' hope for "renewal" now seems largely chimeric, a grandiose expectation, an attractive theory, but one which failed of achievement. In the heady days of the Council it was common to hear predictions that the conciliar reforms would lead to a massive resurgence of the flagging Catholic spirit. Laymen would be stirred from their apathy and alienation and would join enthusiastically in apostolic projects. Liturgy and theology, having been brought to life and made relevant, would be constant sources of inspiration to the faithful. The religious orders, reformed to bring them into line with modernity, would find themselves overwhelmed with candidates who were generous and enthusiastic. The Church would find the number of converts increasing dramatically as it cast off its moribund visage and indeed would come to be respected and influential in worldly circles as it had not been for centuries. In virtually every case the precise opposite of these predictions has come to pass ... in terms of the all pervading spiritual revival which was expected to take place, renewal has obviously been a failure ... Little in the Church seems entirely healthy or promising; everything seems vaguely sick and vaguely hollow. No one can predict with any certainty that the Church will have a visible existence by the end of the century. [The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, pp.22-23]
Professor Hitchcock is presumably referring to the Church in the advanced western countries in the final sentence of this quotation, for we have Christ's promise that His Church will endure until He comes again. "The Catholic Church will survive on this planet till the end of time, believing, teaching and practising essentially what Christ wills of her," writes Fr. Robert E. Southard. "To guarantee this, He has promised us the abiding presence of the Father, the Holy Spirit and Himself. But we must understand this promise correctly. The Church in this or that particular place can be destroyed. There are limits to Christ's promise. It applies to the Church as a whole, not to every member or parish or diocese; not even to nations as a whole."
... It is certainly no exaggeration to claim that the present trend in the West is towards universal apostasy. Two American sociologists, Father Andrew Greeley and William McCready - both progressives - claimed the results of a survey on Catholic life in the U.S.A. since the Council up to 1972 made it clear that "American Catholicism as it was known before 1960 seems to be finished." They found that the decline in Mass attendance had reached "catastrophic proportions" and could think of no other time in the course of human history when so many people - particularly older people - so decisively removed themselves from "canonically required ecclesiastical practices." In questions of doctrine and morality they found that Catholics and Protestants are becoming virtually indistinguishable and that the prospects of a significant proportion of the young continuing to regard themselves as Catholics are remote in the extreme. "The remarkable thing is that no outside foe destroyed us," they remark, "we destroyed ourselves." The pattern described by these sociologists is common, in varying degrees, to most western countries. A spokesman for the French hierarchy lamented the fact that "France is being swept by a tidal wave of unbelief." Cardinal Marty conceded that in the years following the Council, up to 1975, Mass attendance in the parish churches of Paris had declined by the staggering figure of 54 per cent. The decline in vocations has been even more serious - the number of men studying for the priesthood having dropped by 83 per cent between 1963 and 1973.
In Great Britain the decline is serious rather than catastrophic - but the trend is unmistakable. "One does not need to be a prophet to realize that without a dramatic reversal of the present trend there will be no future for the Church in the English-speaking countries," wrote Cardinal Heenan in 1972.
In his opening speech to the Council, Pope John had used stern words towards those whom he designated as "prophets of gloom who are always forecasting disaster." He claimed that even the ashes of St. Peter and his other holy predecessors thrilled "in mystic exultation" at his Council which, "now beginning, rises in the Church like daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light. It is now only dawn." But, as Professor Hitchcock has shown, the predictions of the "reactionaries," Pope John's "prophets of gloom," have been proven correct. Professor Hitchcock is not alone in this judgment. Fr. Louis Bouyer is one of the most distinguished living Catholic scholars and prior to the Council had been regarded as a priest of "progressive" views. He was a prominent figure in the liturgical movement and had expected great things from the Council, especially for the Liturgy Constitution - as his book The Liturgy Revived makes clear. "Unless we are blind," he writes, "we must even state bluntly that what we see looks less like the hoped-for regeneration of Catholicism than its accelerated decomposition." [The Decomposition of Catholicism, p. 1] He reveals that some progressives even hail signs of this decomposition as the first fruits of renewal. "A French weekly which calls itself 'Catholic' went so far recently as to inform us that the postconciliar renewal had not really penetrated the Spanish Church, using as a criterion the fact that the number of priestly and religious vocations has not decreased very far in that country!" It is hardly surprising that Holland is depicted as being in the forefront of renewal when such criteria are used. In 1957 there were 420 ordinations. By 1971 there was not even one ordination to the secular priesthood while in the preceding year 271 priests had died and 243 had abandoned their vocations.
In his opening speech to the Council, Pope John had explained that:
The greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council is this: that the sacred deposit of Christian Doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously... to transmit that doctrine pure and integral, without any attenuation - or distortion, which throughout twenty centuries, notwithstanding difficulties and contrasts, has become the common patrimony of men. It is a patrimony not well received by all, but always a rich treasure available to men of good will.
There is no reason to suppose that he was not totally sincere in this aim. "I often wonder," wrote Cardinal Heenan in 1968, "what Pope John would have thought had he been able to foresee that his Council would provide an excuse for rejecting so much of the Catholic doctrine which he wholeheartedly accepted. Pope Paul may have had this in mind when on 3 April 1968 he spoke to an international audience largely composed of students:
The word of Christ is no longer the truth which never changes, ever living, ever radiant and fruitful, even though at times beyond our understanding. It becomes a partial truth ... and is thus deprived of all objective validity and transcendent authority. It will be said that the Council authorized such treatment of traditional teaching. Nothing is more false, if we are to accept the word of Pope John who launched that aggiornamento in whose name some dare to impose on Catholic dogma dangerous and sometimes reckless interpretations."
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