Article on Vatican II, Pastoral Council

[Ockham]

Let’s set the record straight immediately regarding this Cardinal’s dignity and reputation. You stopped short while smearing his name and failed to mention this:

How did I smear his name, dignity, or reputation?

 

[Sirach2]

It’s not clear what bone you are trying to pick with this thread.

I’ll leave that up to your negative assumptions. It requires no explanation.

Are you accusing people in this forum of ‘extreme Traditionalism’?

Did you read that in my post? If not, then refrain from making the accusation.

Do you have specific examples you wish to discuss?

I simply posted an article as an FYI contribution. However, if specific questions arise as a result of the article, I would consider addressing them

What dogma or matters of faith do you believe some people are opposed to?

This has nothing to do with the thread. I never mentioned dogma or matters of faith, or what I believe some are opposed to.

I’m not sure if it is proper to call ‘teaching’ an article by two members of the laity posted on a blog.

That’s your prerogative to think what you will. Any article that deals with authentic Church teaching, such as was contained within it, may in fact be called a “teaching.” I did not phrase it as dogma. I could have used any number of synonyms that mean the same thing (exhortation, counsel, direction, guidance, instruction, etc.) If you are in the frame of mind to dissect my words, such as I have seen thus far, you open a door for reluctance in sharing.

In the Comments section of the blog we find the quote: “Differing from other Councils, this one was not directly dogmatic, but disciplinary and pastoral. --Pope Paul VI, August 6, 1975, General Audience”.

Without any defining doctrine, V2 left us a series of ambiguous documents which were used by modernists to change the Church without requesting or receiving a mandate from the Magisterium.

And? You agree with this single comment, rather than specific excellent points made in the article itself?
Did you read the earlier post where I addressed the ambiguity? It may be ambiguous only to the laity, who are not privy to Rome’s communications or conversations with the bishops that clarify them. On our part, the duty is to submit in obedience, rather than try to figure out exactly how the Church interprets her documents. It is the heighth of arrogance for the man in the pews to believe he is capable of knowing everything that the bishops and priests understand, due to time spent in seminaries, subsequent workshops, and private magisterial letters of explanation.

In closing, what part of the document in the article from Vatican I did you feel justified in setting aside?

 

[Ockham]

Wow. That’s quite the post of non-answers, dodges, and generally ambiguous intentions.

You have yet to make a case or point. Could you clarify please?

 

[Sirach2]

Wow. That’s quite the post of non-answers, dodges, and generally ambiguous intentions.

You have yet to make a case or point. Could you clarify please?

Your questions were negatively assumptive and out of context to the thread topic. If you want to discuss the article and the points addressed therein, then rephrase your questions, please, rather than impute motivation to my purpose in posting it.

 

[Ockham]

Your questions were negatively assumptive and out of context to the thread topic. If you want to discuss the article and the points addressed therein, then rephrase your questions, please, rather than impute motivation to my purpose in posting it.

Why don’t you just save us both some time and declare what your motivation or point is with this thread?

 

[Sirach2]

As late as yesterday, I saw again the misunderstanding being circulated on this forum that Vatican II was merely pastoral. The error keeps circulating, and unfortunately, it has become de jure in the minds of innocent people who read these threads. This teaching refutes the error and is well worth saving to one’s file for future reference.

I believe it is pretty clear, Ockham. You are trying to read more into it.

 

[Ockham]

This is pretty clear: “Differing from other Councils, this one was not directly dogmatic, but disciplinary and pastoral. --Pope Paul VI, August 6, 1975, General Audience”. The rest of that blog entry isn’t. If you are concerned certain people are defying Vatican II please provide some examples.

 

[wisdomseeker]

This is pretty clear: “Differing from other Councils, this one was not directly dogmatic, but disciplinary and pastoral. --Pope Paul VI, August 6, 1975, General Audience”. The rest of that blog entry isn’t. If you are concerned certain people are defying Vatican II please provide some examples.

that is what i would like to see too. what is it the Traditionalists teach that was not tought before VII.

 

[Ockham]

"*In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided any extraordinary statements of dogmas endowed with the note of infallibility, but it still provided its teaching with the authority of the Ordinary Magisterium which must be accepted with docility according to the mind of the Council concerning the nature and aims of each document.

Pope Paul VI

General Audience, 12 January 1966*"

“The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.”

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI

given July 13, 1988, in Santiago, Chile

catholicknight.blogspot.com/2009/02/vatican-ii-was-just-pastoral-according.html

 

[Sirach2]

Ockham:

This is pretty clear: “Differing from other Councils, this one was not directly dogmatic, but disciplinary and pastoral. --Pope Paul VI, August 6, 1975, General Audience”.

Nevertheless, Ockham, even though the comment may have some elements of truth, you have set aside the critical point from Vatican I, quoted in the article.

As we read in Pastor Aeternus, the First Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church:

To him, in blessed Peter, full power has been given by our Lord Jesus Christ to tend, rule, and govern the universal Church. All this is to be found in the acts of the ecumenical councils and the sacred canons . . . Both clergy and faithful, of whatever rite and dignity . . . are bound to submit to this power by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience and this not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world.

Other important points that I left out initially for brevity, since readers are capable of their own scrutiny, are these:

Therefore, we shouldn’t mistake pastoral for negligible, secondary, or meaningless, nor should we see it as inferior to the magisterial or to purely doctrinal teaching. Yet this is how certain opposition movements have come to misunderstand the Council, always in order to combat it. To briefly summarize their arguments, they oppose the pastoral character of the Vatican Council because they maintain that as a pastoral council, Vatican II only undertook a disciplinary content. Following up on this faulty premise, they then conclude the Second Vatican Council obviously had nothing to do with the magisterial teaching of the Church.

Father de Servigny then points us to the following insights penned by Pope Paul VI in a letter responding to Archbishop Lefebvre’s criticism of certain conciliar texts. “You cannot invoke the distinction between dogmatic and pastoral in order to accept certain texts of the Council and to refute others,”

 

[Ockham]

Again I’ll state that I don’t know what you are going after here. Are you accusing people here of being sedevacanists? Perhaps you should research what Cardinal Congar had to say about papal infallibility.

 

[Sirach2]

Again I’ll state that I don’t know what you are going after here. Are you accusing people here of being sedevacanists? Perhaps you should research what Cardinal Congar had to say about papal infallibility.

Did I say that, or imply it anywhere? No. You avoided, twice, any insight regarding the infallible directive from Vatican I, and instead, you nitpick my motives. Any further invectives will be reported.

Now, let’s talk about the topic and the article, or please remove yourself from this thread. What is your reaction to the directive in Vatican I?

 

[HCC]

“What John XXIII designated by ‘pastoral’ was doctrine,” Cardinal Congar writes, “but expressing itself in history, in the time of the actual world . . . It is doctrinal, but pastoral doctrine, that is to say doctrine that asks to be applied historically”. What Congar means is that, as a pastoral council, the Second Vatican Council sought to apply the Church’s teaching within the context of current history – to make the Church’s doctrine relevant to today’s world.[/INDENT]

Just a quick thought…if what Cardinal Congar says is true, we are 50 years out from the start of the Council. The world has completely changed, does that mean Vatican II has already become irrelevant? And what about those who found little relevance in Vatican II? That could be applied to both Traditionalists and Modernists. Many people in our society today see the Church as being a completely irrelevant institution. I think Cardinal Congar’s argument is flawed.

 

[Ockham]

Did I say that, or imply it anywhere? No. You avoided, twice, any insight regarding the infallible directive from Vatican I, and instead, you nitpick my motives. Any further invectives will be reported.

Now, let’s talk about the topic and the article, or please remove yourself from this thread. What is your reaction to the directive in Vatican I?

If you believe I"ve violated a rule then report it. It is not your place here to give directives.

My reaction to the Vatican I directive is just as it should be as a faithful Catholic. I wish every Catholic followed the teachings of the Pope. If they did we wouldn’t have Communion in the hand, altar girls, the complete absence of Latin in most OFs today and pipe organs would be the norm.

Is there doctrine or discipline you believe Traditional Catholics reject from the Second Vatican Council?

 

[DavidPalm]

Look, traditionalists who question the authority of the council fully agree that we are bound by the authority of the Church, and we also know - a fact which I highly doubt any Catholic could disagree with - that the documents of an ecumenical council only attain their extraordinary authority upon promulgation by the pope, the head through whom Christ’s body speaks. Thus if we want to determine the note of authority enjoyed by the council, we ought to turn to the head who fixed that authority in the first place. Here is what Pope Paul VI - whose authority you and I and all Catholics are bound to accept - had to say about Vatican II’s magisterium:
“In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided any extraordinary statements of dogmas endowed with the note of infallibility, but it still provided its teaching with the Authority of the Ordinary Magisterium which must be accepted with docility according to the mind of the Council concerning the nature and aims of each document” (General Audience, 12 January 1966 - emphasis mine).

This is not inconsistent with the intent of the Council Fathers themselves.
"The extent to which the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council intended to propose the teaching contained in the Documents of Vatican II, is clearly manifested by the famous Nota Previa of November 16, 1964, which cited the conclusion of the Doctrinal Commission, taken on March 6, 1964:
Taking into account Conciliar practice and the pastoral purpose of the present council, the sacred synod defined as binding on the Church only those matters of faith and morals which it has expressly put forward as such.

Whatever else it proposes as the teaching of the supreme Magisterium of the Church is to be acknowledge and accepted by each and every member of the faithful according to the mind of the Council, which is clear form the subject matter and its formulation, following the norms of theological interpretation. (Austin Flannery ed. translation from the official appendix of the Latin version of Lumen Gentium)."

The misunderstanding here does not lie in the understanding of traditionalists who attribute to it the authority of the ordinary magisterium (which is a fallible but nonetheless quite weighty authority). Rather, it instead lies with the OP and others who assume that this attribution of merely ordinary authority is based entirely upon remarks about the pastoral nature of the council. As if every person who pegs Vatican II as part of the ordinary magisterium had such a flaccid intellect as to conclude upon one hearing of the word “pastoral” that a case had both been made and won. The case is made upon the authority of Pope Paul VI. Does the OP dispute the teaching of Vatican II that the ordinary papal magisterium demands religious assent of mind and will? By claiming that Vatican II exercised an extraordinary magisterium the OP has dissented from the teaching of Paul VI on the subject, after all, and thus proven to be the true dissenter. Traditionalists who believe Vatican II to have exercised an ordinary magisterium, OTOH, are obedient to both the pope who promulgated the council and according to the level demanded by the same council.

This is an outstanding posting which, it seems, went totally ignored by the OP. I would like to encourage the OP to interact with this posting and the magisterial teaching contained therein, rather than worrying about what Card. Congar had to say about such things.

 

[Sirach2]

David Palm:

Andreas Hofer:

Does the OP dispute the teaching of Vatican II that the ordinary papal magisterium demands religious assent of mind and will? By claiming that Vatican II exercised an extraordinary magisterium the OP has dissented from the teaching of Paul VI on the subject, after all, and thus proven to be the true dissenter.

This is an outstanding posting which, it seems, went totally ignored by the OP.

It was not overlooked, but yes, ignored. When a poster makes accusations that I am a “proven true dissenter,” without a shred of evidence, and without investigating with a question of what I believe or disbelieve, then I do not dignify the statement with a reply.

For the record, I did not claim that “Vatican II exercised an extraordinary magisterium.” I made no claim whatsoever other than to present the article. Apparently, I hit a raw nerve with some traditionalists who would like to keep their comfort zone in tact.

 

[DavidPalm]

Is there doctrine or discipline you believe Traditional Catholics reject from the Second Vatican Council?

Great question. One which I hope that OP will answer. How many times have I been accused of being a “dissenter on the right” or “disobedient” to Vatican II? I ask just what doctrines of the Church I am allegedly dissenting from or which discipline of Vatican II I reject. And then usually I’m met with some specific interpretation of a Vatican II document which is not itself magisterial but does contradict the teaching of the Church prior to Vatican II. Which neatly illustrates why we so badly need official clarifications of these issues (the CDF clarification on subsistit in is a great example, which needs to be multiplied.) If I’m to be accused of “dissenting” from Vatican II, could you please tell me first exactly what Vatican II teaches on the given topic and how it is to be harmonized with the teaching of the Church prior to Vatican II? Is that so much to ask?

 

[Sirach2]

Is there doctrine or discipline you believe Traditional Catholics reject from the Second Vatican Council?

Why do you persist in trying to force my opinion of what “I” think traditionalists believe? This is not the topic of the thread, and I don’t have an opinion. It would never be accurate, even if I did have one, since people have different ways of believing and can never be classified into percentages.

The only purpose in beginning the thread is stated in my OP. It merely refers to “some.” That could mean either traditionalists or non-traditionalists. The article – not me-- did point, however, to “extreme” tradtionalism.

 

[Ockham]

Why do you persist in trying to force my opinion of what “I” think traditionalists believe? This is not the topic of the thread, and I don’t have an opinion. It would never be accurate, even if I did have one, since people have different ways of believing and can never be classified into percentages.

The only purpose in beginning the thread is stated in my OP. It merely refers to “some.” That could mean either traditionalists or non-traditionalists. The article – not me-- did point, however, to “extreme” tradtionalism.

Why is it so many questions I asked you were not answered yet dodged by playing the victim card? How in the world does asking you a question make you think I’m “trying to force my opinion”? If you want to start threads you should be able to answer people’s questions in regards to it.

 

[Sirach2]

It’s simple, Ockham — stay on topic.

What I “think” about what traditionalists believe, is not the topic, and you keep trying to extort something to pin on me. Read my last post - I have no opinion!