FIFTY YEARS AFTER VATICAN II
HAS THE POST-CONCILIAR CHURCH LOST ITS POWER TO INFLUENCE SOCIETY?
The laudatory celebrations in honor of the 50^th^ anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council (October 11, 1965) are a sobering reminder of the importance of instructing our youth on the historical importance of a council that attempted to change the entire direction of the Church. It was Pope Benedict XVI himself, in a text published on October 12, 2012, who clearly pointed out that Vatican II differed from every previous council, not being convoked to resolve any precise question or specific problem, as past councils were, but to remedy the “loss of the present on the part of Christianity”, since it “seemed more and more to be losing its power to shape society” (zenit.org). This is a fundamental admission, especially with the very significant substitution of “Christianity” for the Church.
The Church`s loss of its power to shape society, and its being considered out of touch with it, was not a problem that arose in the 1960s, but indeed dates from the French revolution, with the rebellion of states and nations against the supernatural order of grace and revelation, the development of rationalism and secularism. The rejection of the Church by civil society, the immediate consequence of the revolution of 1789, excluded the possibility of the Church and its teachings directing society, its laws and its institutions, according to God`s law. St. Pius X had diagnosed this disorder very clearly in his first encyclical in 1903: “For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction? You understand, Venerable Brethren, what this disease is — apostasy from God, than which in truth nothing is more allied with ruin…” It is secular society itself, which refuses to submit to God`s laws, which the Church cannot shape, and to which it is an anachronism.
As Benedict XVI points out, the answer of Vatican II to the Church`s impotency over modern society was the “aggiornamento” or updating, for “Christianity must be in the present if it is to be able to form the future” (Ib.). However this is precisely the opposite of the response of Catholic Tradition to the rebellion of society against God. Catholic Tradition does not at all seek to accommodate the Church to the world, to dilute Catholic doctrine to make it palatable to those who do not have the Faith, to give up our public profession of Faith in the divinity of Christ and the necessity of belonging to His one true Church. The contrary is well expressed by Pope Pius XI in his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, instituting the feast of Christ the King: “If we ordain that the whole Catholic world shall revere Christ as King, We shall administer to the need of the present day, and at the same time provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of secularism, its errors and impious activities. This evil spirit, as you are well aware, Venerable Brethren, has not come into being in one day; it has long lurked beneath the surface. The empire of Christ over all nations was rejected”. Deploring the weakness and timidity of so many Catholics, who strive to avoid conflict, he continues: “But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behoves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then fired with apostolic zeal…they would valiantly defend His rights.”
For Benedict XVI the “positive step into the new era” and “the encounter with the great themes of the modern epoch” are to be found in the two most revolutionary documents of Vatican II, the declarations on Religious Liberty and on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian religions. Benedict XVI in this text admits that these documents go beyond “the doctrine of tolerance” and that “it could seem as if the modern version of religious freedom presupposed the inaccessibility of the truth to man and so, perforce, shifted religion into the sphere of the subjective”. This is a fundamental admission, namely that these documents promote a modernist rethinking of religion that denies the objective truthfulness of the one true religion, and to this he offers no refutation. This is, of course, the fundamental theory of secularism, of our modern liberal society, to which he wants to update the Church. Pope Pius XI states and condemns very clearly this false principle of secularism: “The right which the Church has from Christ Himself to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation, that right was denied. Then gradually the religion of Christ came to be likened to false religions, and placed ignominiously on the same level with them.” (Ib.).
Benedict XVI wrote on a similar theme on September 14, in his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, The Church in the Middle East. After extolling religious freedom, “the pinnacle of all other freedoms…rooted in the dignity of the human person” (§26), he declared that it is more than tolerance, but that it “does not open the door to relativism, as some would maintain” (§27): “There is a need to move beyond tolerance to religious freedom”. But that the “some” who maintain that this religious freedom opens the door to relativism are right is clearly proven by the rest of this same paragraph, in which he explains his purely subjective notion of truth: “It is not fitting to state in an exclusive way: `I possess the truth`. [The truth is not possessed by anyone]{.underline}; it is always a gift which calls us to undertake a journey of ever closer assimilation to truth. Truth can only be known and experienced in freedom; for this reason we cannot impose the truth on others; truth is disclosed only in an encounter of love”(Ib.). If truth cannot be possessed, if nobody can say that he has the truth, if truth is a journey without an objective term to it, then logically truth is subjective.
This redefinition of truth by Benedict XVI is clearly explained in his June 29, 2009 encyclical, Charity in truth. Truth is no longer the correspondence of the mind to an exterior and objective reality, which is fixed, firm, absolute and unchanging, which objective submission is the basis of the Catholic Church`s possessing the truth. The Pope there explains that truth is of its very nature a communication, a sharing, a dialogue, to such an extent that without such a sharing there can be no truth: “Truth, in fact, is [logos]{.underline} which creates [dia-logos]{.underline}, and hence communication and communion.” It follows from this that the Church does not possess the truth, but when it shares, it “searches for truth” (Ib. §9), and that this truth is not fixed, but constantly changing and evolving. “It is not a case of two typologies of social doctrine, one pre-conciliar and one post-conciliar, differing from one another: on the contrary, there is a single teaching, consistent [and at the same time ever new]{.underline}” (Ib. §12). This is the whole basis of Benedict XVI`s theory of a hermeneutics of continuity: we can interpret the post-conciliar teaching as in continuity with pre-conciliar Catholic Tradition because truth evolves, so that it can be one, coherent and same teaching whilst saying different or even contradictory things, for “coherence does not mean a closed system: on the contrary, it means dynamic faithfulness to a light received” (Ib.). Already in 1907, St. Pius X in his encyclical condemning Modernism, had hit the nail on the head when he stated that “they have reached that pitch of folly at which they pervert the eternal concept of truth and the true meaning of religion” (§13).
The combat in the Church consequently remains a combat for Catholic Tradition, against the errors of Vatican II, its secularism, its spirit of indifference, its implicit denial of the unique truthfulness of the Catholic Church. It is a combat for Christ the King, “for he must reign, until he hath put all his enemies under his feet” (I Cor. 15:25). It is a combat for those of us “for whom there is but one and only one truth” (Pascendi, §36 against the Modernists` evolution of truth), who believe in the simplicity of the unchanging divinely revealed Truth.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.