EXORCISING VATICAN II:

A HARD FAITH: How the New Pope and His Predecessor Redefined Vatican II (Peter J. Boyer, May 16, 2005, The New Yorker Magazine)

Because Karol Wojtyla’s outsized presence so neatly suited secular description he was the media age Vatican who helped to bring down the Soviet Union it had been possible to overlook the radical core of his papacy. His predecessor John XXIII, who began his pontificate by convoking the transformational Second Vatican Council, is credited with opening the Church to the modem world. John Paul II commenced his tenure on a starkly different note. His first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (“Redeemer of Man”), in 1979, opened with the words that foreshadowed his central theme: “The redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.” Beginning with this letter to the Church, and developed through a vast body of writing and preaching, Wojtyla’s bold proposal for the world was that there is one abiding Truth, and in it resides the most promising hope for humankind. Liberals admired the Pope’s ecumenical gestures his historic visit to the synagogue of Rome, his pilgrimage to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, his day of prayer with leaders of the world’s other religions at Assisi in 1986 but they were dismayed by the publication, in 2000, of Dominus Jesus, the Church’s declaration that Jesus Christ is the only true way to salvation.

Vatican II had acknowledged the validity of what is “true and holy” in other religions, which had led the Church toward what John Paul II saw as a dangerous acceptance of religious indifferentism. His 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio, warned against the “incorrect theological perspectives” that led to the idea that “‘one religion is as good as another.’“ The eternal mission of the Church, he wrote, was Christian evangelism to the world.

In his manifest, and deeply spiritual, Christocentrism, John Paul 11 had been the sort of Roman Catholic that even an evangelical Protestant could admire. (The Catholic writer Michael Novak quotes a Southern Baptist friend as having once remarked about John Paul II, “I’m as anti-papist as you can get. But you’ve got a Pope who knows how to Pope!”) in an age he constantly decried for its relativism, Wojtyla proclaimed an absolute Truth, based on a fundamentally orthodox theology. Ratzinger’s job was to hammer out the administrative details punishing dissident theologians, framing the Pope’s exclusion of women from the priesthood as infallible teaching, discouraging liturgical novelty, and so on.

It was this fundamentalism of John Paul that Cardinal Ratzinger was defending in his instantly famous homily at the Mass for the election of a new Pope, on April 18th. “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism,” he said, “which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

Ratzinger’s quick election by the College of Cardinals a Vatican version of a landslide victory was an unwelcome signal to “issue” Catholics that Wojtyla’s protracted era of orthodoxy had been granted an extension. Progressives had lived in a suspended mood of fin de régime for a very long time, which was occasionally expressed as an impatience with the old man’s stubborn postponement of the inevitable. Now he was dead, and still his regime lived.

The new Pope clearly shares the view of his friend and predecessor that the Church must stand against modernity, to resist what he called “the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties.” The West, ever more faithless, is now considered mission territory, but Ratzinger has suggested that the Church itself must first undertake a process of purification. “Lord, your Church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking in water on every side,” he said in a Good Friday prayer at the Colosseum. “In your field we see more weeds than wheat. The soiled garments and face of your Church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have soiled them!” George Weigel, a biographer of John Paul II, noting Ratzinger’s choice of papal name, has observed that one of the Benedictines’ mottoes is Succisa viresci “Pruned, it grows again.” The Church is shrinking in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States, and Ratzinger seems to face with an air of determined acceptance the prospect that it will grow even smaller. “The essential things in history begin always with the small, more convinced communities,” Ratzinger said in an interview with the Catholic television and radio network Eternal Word two years ago. “So, the Church begins with the twelve Apostles. Smaller numbers, I think but from these small numbers we will have a radiation of joy in the world. And so, it’s an attraction, as it was in the old Church.”

There is much to suggest that the pruning was already well underway during the pontificate of John Paul II. In the American Church, the remnant taking shape can already be clearly seen in the growing, fervently evangelical new movements encouraged by John Paul II, and in a resurgent orthodoxy in the seminary’ This renewal, as it calls itself; is led by a rising group of churchmen who are unashamedly orthodox and who were fiercely loyal to the person, and agenda, of John Paul II.

In the secular press, the shorthand way of distinguishing progressive Catholic ideas or individuals from conservative ones is by their orientation to Vatican II. Progressives pressing the case for a particular reform will often cite “the spirit of Vatican II.” Conservatives, at the mention of that ecumenical council, tend to smile tightly and change the subject (unless the moment is seized for a full refutation). The Second Vatican Council ran in four sessions, from 1962 to 1965. Pope John XXIII, who called the Council in the hope of renewing the Church for its mission of presenting Christ to the world, died after the first session, in 1963. His successor, Pope Paul II, presided over the final three sessions, and eventually came to the conclusion that the Council may have loosed within the Church an impulse of self-immolation. “Satan’s smoke,” he said in 1972, “has made its way into the temple of God through some crack.”

Unfortunately, Vatican II isn't the only area where the Church has problems with Satan slipping through the cracks.

MORE:
Vatican plan to block gay priests (Jamie Doward, August 28, 2005, The Observer)

The new Pope faces his first controversy over the direction of the Catholic church after it was revealed that the Vatican has drawn up a religious instruction preventing gay men from being priests.

The controversial document, produced by the Congregation for Catholic Education and Seminaries, the body overseeing the church's training of the priesthood, is being scrutinised by Benedict XVI.

It been suggested Rome would publish the instruction earlier this month, but it dropped the plan out of concern that such a move might tarnish his visit to his home city of Cologne last week.

The document expresses the church's belief that gay men should no longer be allowed to enter seminaries to study for the priesthood. Currently, as all priests take a vow of celibacy, their sexual orientation has not been considered a pressing concern.

Vatican-watchers believe the Pope harbours doubts about whether the church should publish the document, which has already been the subject of three drafts.

'Inevitably, such a directive will be met with opposition,' said John Haldane, professor of moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews.

The instruction tries to dampen down the controversy by eschewing a moral line, arguing instead that the presence of homosexuals in seminaries is 'unfair' to both gay and heterosexual priests by subjecting the former to temptation.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 10, 2005 12:00 AM