SELECTIONS BY PAULY FONGEMIE
Time Bombs
"There were time bombs in the Council," writes Archbishop Lefebvre: These "time bombs" were, of course, the ambiguous passages inserted in the official documents by the liberal Fathers and periti, passages which could weaken the presentation of traditional teaching by abandoning the traditional terminology; by omissions; or even by ambiguous phraseology which could seem to favour, or at least be compatible with, a non-Catholic interpretation after the Council. [Emphasis in bold added.] To repeat a remark by Cardinal Heenan, cited in the previous chapter: "A determined group could wear down opposition and produce a formula patient of both an orthodox and modernistic interpretation." Archbishop Lefebvre has gone to the extent of describing the Council as "a conglomeration of ambiguities, inexactitudes, vaguely expressed feelings, terms susceptible of any interpretation and opening wide all doors. [Une Eveque Parle, 1974, p. 161] He has been criticized for such statements even by some priests who are as far from having Modernist sympathies as he is himself. Fr. Edward Holloway is an English theologian to whom all Catholics owe a debt of gratitude for the lead he has given in exposing and rejecting the ambiguities, inexactitudes, and vaguely expressed feelings of the Agreed Statements on the Eucharist and Ministry (sic) produced by the Catholic/Anglican Joint International Commission. He is quite adamant that Mgr. Lefebvre's criticisms of the conciliar documents are unjustified. "With all respect," he writes, "it is not true that the decrees of the Council 'lack definition' and proceed along courses alien to the traditional definitions and emphasis of the Church in preceding Councils ... they do express clearly the nature and purposes, the doctrines and the structures of the Church, and do it without ambiguity." [Faith, Nov. 1975 Editorial] It would, of course, be necessary to write an almost endless series of books to vindicate either of these views, not simply examining the final format of the documents but comparing them with the original schemaae which they replaced. To give just one example, the Constitution on the Church contains, in paragraph 25, a passage stating that "religious submission of will and mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra. That is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgements made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be made known chiefly either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking. [Abbott, p. 48]
"There you are!" Fr. Holloway could point out, "A very fine passage. What more could you want? It proves my point."
But it must be borne in mind that Mgr. Lefebvre was appointed by Pope John as a member of the Central Preparatory Commission which made a laborious examination of all the original schemae as they were prepared. He could inform Fr. Holloway that the original schema contained an almost identical passage but with the addition of these words which are, of course, a quotation from Humani Generis. "And when the Roman Pontiffs go out of their way to pronounce on some subject which has hitherto been controverted, it must be clear to everybody concerned that, in the mind and intention of the Pontiffs concerned this subject can no longer be regarded as a matter of free debate among theologians." [p. 11] A group of bishops submitted an amendation asking that this passage should be replaced in the revised schema but their suggestion was not accepted. [Une Eveque Parle, 1974, p. 120]
"There you are!" Mgr. Lefebvre could reply. "It proves my point."
... Fr. Holloway does concede that there are elements which can be picked out "which mean different things to differer interpreters especially in the light, or the twilight, of the Council debates." But he insists that taken within their context and clarified by the footnotes they can be interpreted "only in a sense consistent with tradition if the interpreter is honest to the Constitution as a conciliar document. There is no conciliar sense of any document of a General Council, whic abstracts or derogates from the explicit sense the Pope give to the document." The final sentence in particular is totally correct and in Chapter XII dealing with the status of thE documents, some stress is laid upon the fact that where a apparent ambiguity occurs we have a duty to interpret it, and insist that it is interpreted, in a sense consistent with the traditional teaching of the Church. The so-called "Spirit of Vatican II" is certainly based upon a misinterpretation of the documents in the sense that the Holy Ghost could not have intended a General Council to promulgate unorthodox teaching. This remains true even if the passage concerned is being interpreted by the periti who drafted it in the sense that they intended - for it is the sense intended by the legislator and those who helped him to produce his legislation which is legally binding. But this in no way weakens Mgr. Lefebvre charge of ambiguity - and, as this chapter will make clear, he is by no means alone in making it. The fact that a particular passage ought to be interpreted only in one way does not alter the fact that it can be interpreted in another. It is no doubt possible to find passages of pre Vatican II papal and conciliar teaching which could be considered ambiguous - but such instances would be very rare indeed. When a Protestant praises some aspect of a Vatican II document as a step towards Protestantism it can be argued that he is in error as this cannot be the case - but prior to this Council, Catholic teaching had been stated so clearly and so explicitly that no such impression could have been given. Only one interpretation, the orthodox Catholic interpretation, was possible. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ambiguity as an "expression capable of more than one meaning." Readers must decide for themselves whether this book indicates that such ambiguity does exist in the Council documents, and also whether or not there was a change of emphasis with regard to certain basic doctrines of such an extent that Protestants in good faith imagine the Church is approaching the point of accepting their position. The Liturgy Constitution will be examined in some detail in this respect in Chapter XVI, some of the other documents will be looked at in this and subsequent chapters IX, X, and XI in particular.
There can be little doubt that Professor Oscar Cullmann was one of the most distinguished scholars among the Protestant observers at the Council, a man of such stature and integrity that he merits the respect of Catholics of every shade of opinion. It would be a rash commentator indeed who could dismiss Professor Cullmann's opinion lightly, and the extent to which his opinions coincide with those ofMgr. Lefebvre is a factor which requires the most careful consideration. He insists that "the definitive texts are for the most part compromise texts (textes de compromis). On far too many occasions they juxtapose opposing viewpoints without establishing any genuine internal link between them. Thus every affirmation of the power of bishops is accompanied in a manner which is almost tedious by an insistence upon the authority of the pope ...
The importance of Professor Cullmann's assessment of the mbiguous nature of the conciliar texts can only be enhanced when it is considered that there can be very, very few Catholics whose knowledge of either the Councilor or its texts even approaches his own.
An equally impressive testimony to Mgr. Lefebvre's thesis comes from Peter Hebblethwaite. Until he left the priesthood to marry he was editor of The Month, once one of the most reputable journals in the English-speaking Catholic world, but now reduced to the status of little more than a purveyor of very tedious liberal party-line hand-outs. Hebblethwaite concedes that much of the post-conciliar malaise springs from the fact that the disputants are literally talking at cross-purposes. The Council laid down admirable (sic) principles which were resisted by some while others developed and extended them. But it had produced compromise texts, and where it could not solve a difficulty, it hopefully set the contrasting positions alongside each other. The result is that the conciliar texts are capable of different readings.
... The justification for this lack of precision was that the Council was pastoral and not dogmatic. "The Second Vatican Council was unique in yet another way," writes Cardinal Heenan. "It deliberately limited its own objectives. There were no be no specific definitions. Its purpose from the first was pastoral renewal within the Church and a fresh approach to those outside." [Counciland Clergy, 1966, pp. 61-62] Archbishop Lefebvre feels bound to "emphasize the fact that, throughout the Council, there was an adamant, determined refusal to define terms with regard to the subjects under discussion, and it was this insistent refusal which made philosophical and theological discussion impossible; the result was that we were able to describe various subjects but not define them. Thus with no definitions, there was little difficulty in falsifying traditional definitions, and this was, in fact, what frequently happened. In my opinion, it is for this very reason that we are now faced with a whole system which we can neither accept nor easily refute because of its ambiguity, a system which casts aside all traditional definiions. [Une Eveque Parle, 1974, p. 155]
Cardinal Ruffiini expressed particular concern at the fact that the Decree on Ecumenism failed to provide any adequate definition of the word "ecumenism" itself - a factor which he considered dangerous as the word is used in a different sense by Catholics and Protestants.
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