SELECTIONS BY PAULY FONGEMIE
From Blitzkrieg
Many of the Council Fathers, perhaps most, arrived in Rome for the First Session of Vatican II without any clear idea as to why they were there and without any definite plan as to what they intended to achieve. They could well have sung, as did the British troops who found themselves in France in 1914, "We're here because we're here because we're here!"
"Looking back," writes Cardinal Heenan, "it is easy to see how psychologically unprepared bishops were for what happened during the first session. Most of us arrived in Rome in October 1962 without any idea of the anti-Italian mood of many Europeans ... The conciliar fathers for the most part shared Pope John's illusion that the bishops of the world had come together as brothers in Christ for a short convivial meeting."
Bishop Lucey of Cork and Ross (Ireland) has written that certain "hierarchies came to the Council knowing what they wanted and having prepared a way to get it, others came feeling their way." Prominent among those who knew what they wanted were the German-speaking, Dutch, and French hierarchies. Before the Council had even been announced, there had been pressure in these countries "for a modernization of the way in which the Church faces its internal problems. Some groups were openly agitating for a reorganization, if not abolition, of the Roman Curia. Others wanted changes in the laws and regulations affecting marriage and education, the Mass, the Sacraments, liturgical ceremonies, the inquisitorial and condemnatory procedures of the Holy Office, clerical dress and the unseemly pomp of prelatial vestiture and a redefinition of the rights and prerogatives of bishops and laymen in the Church's structure.
The extent to which these aims have now been achieved is the most evident fact of life in the post-conciliar Church. Indeed, the ease with which total victory was achieved surprised even the progressives themselves. "They had come to the first session of the Council hoping that they might win some concessions. They returned home conscious that they had obtained complete victory. And they were confident that numberless other victories were yet to come. [Emphasis in bold added by the Web Master.] In an address to the U.S. Bishops' Press Panel, at the end of the First Session, Fr. Hans Kung, the Swiss peritus (expert), "asserted jubilantly that what had once been the dream of an avant-garde group in the Church had 'spread and permeated the entire atmosphere of the Church due to the Council'." [The Second Session, X. Rynne, p. 27] A key aim of the European avant-garde (obsession might be a more accurate word) had been to replace the true concept of Catholic ecumenism, as laid down by Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos, with a policy of "unity at any price." The atmosphere in Germany as the Council began was well summed up in a letter to The Tablet by Fr. F. J. Ripley, one of England's best-known priests. He warned against "the desire now manifest in Germany to present the Catholic mysteries in terms traditionally associated with Protestantism. Many visitors to Germany recently have been shocked by certain elements of the new approach. An eminent Australian asked a parish priest how he encouraged his people to visit the Blessed Sacrament since he had removed it from the High Altar to an obscure side-chapel. 'I don't,' he said. All who have spoken to me after visits to Germany have been, to express it very mildly, disturbed by what they saw there. As another priest put it: 'They are talking about sweeping away useless accretions to the liturgy; but they are in reality attacking perfectly legitimate developments which have meant much to the piety of the faithful. Pius XII warned against this very thing in Mediator Dei.'
"Yet another visitor, an American priest, summed up his impression of Catholic scholarship in Germany like this: 'I guess they're waging a total war against tradition.' Nor is it confined to the liturgy. Some speak of 'the tragic definition of the Assumption,' which came perilously near to being the 'death blow of the Ecumenical Movement.' Others want us to drop reference to tradition as a source of revelation. And alongside all this is a calculated refusal to try to make individual converts on the excuse that conversion work will impede progress towards unity - again a practical reversal of the policy of the Church since apostolic times.' [Ibid., pp. 27-28] It is important to note that this letter was published in 1962 and was not written with the benefit of hindsight. It is hardly necessary to point out the extent to which the situation which Fr. Ripley described as existing in Germany in 1962 has spread throughout the West since the Council, and practices which he then criticised as aberrations are now recommended to us by the Vatican. The General Instruction to the new Mass recommends, and recommends strongly, "that the Blessed Sacrament be reserved in a special chapel well suited for private prayer apart from the nave." [Wiltgen, p. 82] And in certain respects England could now claim to have stolen a march on the Germans as Catholics and Anglicans not only share the same churches in some places but even a common tabernacle.
Cardinal Heenan has explained how completely unaware the British and American bishops were of the extent to which so many of their European counterparts had been infected by what he later termed "ecumania." "They did not know," he writes, "what the Dutch were thinking and were quite unprepared for the later discovery that some Dutch Catholics had made almost a religion of ecumenism. Impatient of any dogmatic differences, they were ready to barter any doctrine in the cause of external unity. When the Secretariat for Christian Unity was first set up, there were not less than four members from Holland. This did not seem significant at the time, because the rest of the Church was unaware of the vast religious change in Holland since the war.
"Looking back, it is quite clear that the English-speaking bishops were quite unprepared for the kind of Council the rest of the northern Europeans were planning. The Americans were even less prepared than the British.
... The tactic used by the Germans and their allies can best be described by comparing it with a technique which they introduced to military warfare, that of the Blitzkrieg. Time and again they shattered and demoralized their opponents by the efficient use of the pressure group methods used in political takeovers. It is doubtful whether any hierarchy but the German would have had the efficiency, the organization, and the resources necessary to initiate and sustain such a campaign.
One point must be made clear here, it is not intended to suggest that such tactics are necessarily unethical - although it will be shown in Chapter XI that some liberals had no hesitation in using unethical tactics to further their aims. However, there is nothing unethical about being efficient, preparing a programme, or canvassing support. Such tactics had been used at previous councils - though on a far more modest scale. Nor is it intended to impugn the motives of the bishops concerned. They had correctly assessed that the Church was at a crucial period in her history and, unless there is specific evidence to the contrary, it should be presumed that they were motivated by the sincerely held conviction that their policies were in the best interests of the Church. It will also be shown in Chapter V that the proponents of neo-modernism ... were found principally among the periti (experts) rather than among the bishops themselves. The conciliar documents were not so much the work of the bishops who voted for them as of the experts who prepared them, and as whose mouthpieces so many of the bishops were contented to act. Some of these periti had been under suspicion of unorthodoxy during the reign of Pope Pius XII. His encyclical Humani Generis shows how clearly this great pontiff appreciated the growing strength and menace of the neo-modernist fifth column within the Church. Many of the periti have become notorious since the Council for their opposition to Catholic teaching on various points of faith and morals - men such as Charles Davis (who has formally apostatized), Hans Kung, Gregory Baum, Edward Schillebeeckx, Bernard Haring, and Rene Laurentin.
Another factor of great importance in assessing the conduct of most Council Fathers is that probably the majority of those who supported the German bishops did so because it seemed the fashionable thing to do, because everyone else seemed to be taking this line. There was once a popular song entitled Everybody's doing it! When everybody is doing it the normal reaction is to do it too; and even those who have been consecrated as bishops remain only too human in many respects -as any Church historian will confirm. If a bandwagon begins to roll along, it takes great strength of character to refrain from leaping upon it. "When the vote came round," wrote one American Father, wise after the event, "like wise Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, 'We always voted at our party's call; we never thought of thinking for ourselves at all.' That way you can save yourself a world of trouble."
On the other hand, it would be unrealistic not to recognize the fact that there must have been some Council Fathers well aware of the direction the policies they advocated would take the Church and who were happy to co-operate with the periti because they shared the same theological outlook. ...
The Council was under siege by the progressive forces from the very first day.
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