Benedict XVI Is to Reinterpret the Second Vatican Council (article)

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BarbaraTherese

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http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=43223&eng=y

This article is somehat lengthy and there are also interesting links at the end of it. There may be some interest in it and perhaps comments that will come out of a read of the article etc. Personally I do hope for great things of Pope Benedict and sorting out all the internal conflict re Vatican2 is moving in that area to my mind.
I am quoting herein only a portion of the article.
Included in the article on the above link is another article written by The President of the Pontifical Committee for Historic Sciences, Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, which is very interesting indeed and which The Holy Father apparently commented on in a homily delivered on 8th. December 2005. If time permits I will try and locate that homily and post it into the thread, unless another member locates it and posts it first.

Benedict XVI Is to Reinterpret

the Second Vatican Council.

This Is the Preface
Forty years after the event, the president of the Pontifical Committee for Historic Sciences, Walter Brandmüller, clears up some historical issues. On December 8th, the Pope will give his assessment
by Sandro Magister

ROMA, December 5 2005 – Benedict XVI’s homily during the December 8th mass in Saint Peter’s, exactly forty years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, is eagerly awaited.

There are conflicting interpretations within the Church of this event and its consequences. One wide-spread idea is that Vatican II marked a “new beginning” in Church history, and that thanks to it – its “spirit” more than the words of its actual texts – the dogmas, laws, structures and traditions of the Church entered a phase of permanent reform. However, Joseph Ratzinger has shown on a number of occasions that he does not share this reading of the facts. And so has – amongst others – his cardinal vicar for the diocese of Rome, Camillo Ruini.
 
I have not had any luck finding the homily by The Holy Father supposedly delivered on 8th. December 2005 on the subject of Vatican2. I don’t know procedures and it may not be translated and released for publication yet. I have looked for it without success on the Vatican website…this just could be due to my working knowledge only of search facilities - and self taught at that. If anyone else does locate it and I plan to keep my eye out for it, would be grateful if you posted the link into this thread being very much interested in reading it myself. My Modern History assignment of choice this year was a 2000 word essay on Vatican2 which I and my tutor incidentally both found fascinating (where I am concerned the researching, writing the essay another matter!😃 )…
I have been reading a few articles connected with Vatican2 (which I think will remain a lifelong interest for me) and apparently all Councils are followed by a period that is somewhat ‘turbulant’…thus the confusions that do exist since Vatican2 are nothing unusual - but it is great to know that The Holy Father (in hope! … unsure how far to take media as correct) has made some sort of move to sort out the confusions and once The Holy Father speaks, we can know exactly where we stand.

Barb
 
Emphasis added:
One wide-spread idea is that Vatican II marked a “new beginning” in Church history, and that thanks to it – its “spirit” more than the words of its actual texts – the dogmas, laws, structures and traditions of the Church entered a phase of permanent reform. However, Joseph Ratzinger has shown on a number of occasions that he does not share this reading of the facts.
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Only because the idea of “permanent reform” is not only very silly in and of itself and Vatican II initiated no such program.

– Mark L. Chance.
 
The Holy Spirit chose Cardinal Ratzinger as our new Pope for a reason.

Thank God for Pope Benedict XVI.
 
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BarbaraTherese:
I have not had any luck finding the homily by The Holy Father supposedly delivered on 8th. December 2005 on the subject of Vatican2. I don’t know procedures and it may not be translated and released for publication yet. I have looked for it without success on the Vatican website…this just could be due to my working knowledge only of search facilities - and self taught at that. If anyone else does locate it and I plan to keep my eye out for it, would be grateful if you posted the link into this thread being very much interested in reading it myself. My Modern History assignment of choice this year was a 2000 word essay on Vatican2 which I and my tutor incidentally both found fascinating (where I am concerned the researching, writing the essay another matter!😃 )…
I have been reading a few articles connected with Vatican2 (which I think will remain a lifelong interest for me) and apparently all Councils are followed by a period that is somewhat ‘turbulant’…thus the confusions that do exist since Vatican2 are nothing unusual - but it is great to know that The Holy Father (in hope! … unsure how far to take media as correct) has made some sort of move to sort out the confusions and once The Holy Father speaks, we can know exactly where we stand.

Barb
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The speech is only in Italian presently. Hopefully, it will be translated to English soon…
 
I’m taking Italian in school and am pretty proficient at it, so I’ll try translating pargraph by paragraph.
 
Ok, first aragraph.

40 years ago, December 8 1965, on the Piazza before this Basilica of St. Peter, Pope Paul VI solemly concluded Vatican Council II. It was inagurated according to the will of John XIII on 11 October 1962, from the feast of the Maternity of Mary, to its conclusion on the Day of the Immaculate. A Marian frame surrounded the Concil. In reality, it is much more than a frame; it is a course of its entire journey. He reminds us, as he also reminded the Council Fathers, to the image of the Virgin in waiting, who lives in the Word of God, who preserves in her heart the words which come to her from God, and, joined as in a mosaic, teaches to understand them; he reminds us of the great belief which, full of faithfullness, is placed in the hands of God, abbandoning itself to His will; he reminds us of the humble Mother who, while the disciples put themselves to flight, stays under the cross. Paul VI, in his speech on the occasion of the promulgation of the conciliar Constitution on the Church, he had judged Mary as “tutrix huius Concilii”-- “protector of this Council” and, with an unmistakeable allusion to the recounting of Pentecost handed down from Luke, he had said that the Fathers were themselves reunited in the room of the Council “cum Maria, Matre Iesu” (with Mary, the mother of Jesus) and, also in her name, they would be sent.
 
There was an article in Our Sunday Visitor either last week or the week beofre that covers the background of this; Hans Kung and then Father Ratzinger were both theologians at the Council, as well as John Paul 2 who was then bishop (sorry, I still can’t spell his last name!).

The article notes that the complaints started with JP 2 and have simply spilled over onto Benedict 16, from the liberals who saw V2 as simply a platform for strating changes that went where V2 not fonly did not go, but had no intention of going.

the article talks about wome of what got the liberal ball rolling, and comments that neither JP 2 nor Benedict 16 intend to “reinterpret” V2, but rather intend to return to what the documents actually say (what a novel idea!).

So, the language of “reinterpretation” is liberal spin language. And given the miserably inadequate knowledge base of almost all reporters about affairs Catholic, one should not rush to the conclusion that the articel writer in the OP was liberal, but rather, probably used some liberal sources in preparing the arcticle, undoubtedly without even realizing what they were saying.
 
second paragraph, Pope Benedict’s Immaculate Conception homily:

Resting indelibly in my memory is the moment wherein, hearing his [Paul VI] words: “Mariam Sanctissimam declaramus Matrem Ecclesiae”-- “We declare Most Holy Mary the Mother of the Church”, spotaneously the Fathers rose from their seats to applaud in ovation, rendering homage to the Mother of God, to Our Mother, to the Mother of the Church. In fact, with this title the Pope had summarized the Marian doctrine of the Council and had given the keys to its understanding. Mary does not stay only in a relationship with Christ, the Son of God who, as man had wanted to become her Son. Being totally united to Christ, she also belongs totally to us. Yes, we can say that Mary is near to us as is no other human being, because Christ is man for mankind and all his being is an “existance for us”. Christ, say the Fathers, as the Head is inseparable from his Body which is the Church, creating together with her, as it were, a unique living matter. The Mother is the Head and also the Mother of all the Church; she is, as it were, totally disposed from herself; she gave herself entirely to Christ and with Him she comes given as a gift to us all. Indeed, the more of the human person a person gives, the more she finds herself.
 
3rd paragraph, Pope’s Immaculate conception homily:

The Council intended to tell us this: Mary is so weaved in the great mystery of the Church that she and the Church are inseparable as they are inseparable from Christ. Mary reflects the Church, she prefigures it in her person and, in all the turbulences which afflict the suffering and toiling Church, she remains forever the star of salvation. It is she who is its true center wherein we entrust ourselves, her periphery also often weighs us on the soul. Pope Paul VI, in the challenge of the promulation of the Constitution on the Church, placed in a new light all this by means of a new title profoundly-rooted in Tradition, truly with the intent of illuminating the interior structure of the teaching on the Church developed in the Council. Vatican II had to express itself on the instructutional components of the Church: the Bishops and the Pontiff, the priests, the laypersons and the religious, in their communions and in their relations; it had to describe the Church on a journey, “embracing in its bosom sinners, at the same time holy and always in need of purification, always following the way of penance and renewal” (Lumen Gentium). But this “Petrine” aspect of the Church is included in that “Marian” aspect. In Mary, the Immaculate, we meet the essence of the Church in a manner which is not deformed. From her we must learn to become the same “ecclesial souls”, as the Fathers themselves express, in order that we also, according to the words of Saint Paul, present ourselves immaculate to the presence of the Lord, as he had wanted us to do since the beginning.
 
Thank you very much to all who have contributed to this thread to date, I have learnt something from each Post.

Quoting OTM…
neither JP 2 nor Benedict 16 intend to “reinterpret” V2, but rather intend to return to what the documents actually say (what a novel idea!).
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I agree especially with the above. I did think that ‘reinterpret’ was not the best of choices perhaps, because the intention of The Holy Father is to return to the true meaning of Vatican2…“re-establish” may have been a more accurate choice. This can be a problem with translations that the true meaning is not actually captured by the word used in the translation.

Thank you for the translation Fidei Defensor…and blessings on your study of Italian. Obviously from the translation you gave the studies are sure progressing.

And hi to you Jabronie. Indeed thank God for Pope Benedict XVI…he even looks like a saint to me! My joy went through the roof when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected our new Pope.

I agree with your comments too Mark…
Only because the idea of “permanent reform” is not only very silly in and of itself and Vatican II initiated no such program.

– Mark L. Chance.
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Thanks Mark for your comments with which I agree.

Barb
 
Thanks for the compliments, BarbaraTherese.

Everyone please bear with me, I have a few typos here and there. Here is paragraph 4 of the pope’s homily:

But now we must ask ourselves: what does “Mary, the Immaculate” mean? Does this title have something to tell? Today’s liturgy clarifies for us the content of this word in two great images. There is first of all the marvelous recounting of the Annunciation to Mary, the Virgin of Nazareth, of the coming of the Messiah/ The greeting of the Angel is woven of the threads of the Old Testament, specially of the prophet Zepheniah. He does see that Mary, the humble lady of the countryside who descended from a priestly line and carried in herself the great priestly legacy of Israel, is “the holy begotten one” of Israel, to whom the prophets, in all the periods of torment and darkness, have made reference. In sher is presented the true Zion, that pure, the living home of God. In her lives the Lord, in her he finds the place of his rest. She is the living house of God, a God who does not live in buildings of stone, but in the heart of the Living Man. She is the sprout who, in the gloom of the winter of history, rises from the fallen trunk of David. In her is completed to word of the Psalm: “The earth has given its fruit” (67:7). She is the shoot, from which is derived the tree of redemption and of the redeemed. God has not failed, as he was able to already appear at the beginning of history with Adam and Eve, or during the period of Babylonian Exile, and as he has newly appeared at the time of Mary when Israel had become a people without importance in an occupied region, with a few good recognizable marks of his holiness. God has not failed. In the humility of the house of Nazareth lives the Holy Israel, the pure begotten one. God has saved and he saves his people. From the fallen trunk rises, his new history rises anew, becoming a new living force which orents and pervades the world. Mary is the Holy Israel, she says “Yes” to the Lord, she places herself fully in his disposition and threfore becomes the living Temple of God.
 
Paragraph 5:

The second image is much more difficult and obscure. This metaphor, derived from the Book of Genesis, speaks to us from a great historical distance, and only through toil can it be clarified; only in the course of history is it posssible to develop an understanding more profound than that which is applicable. It predicts that during all of history she will continue to struggle among the man and serpent, that is, among man and the power of evil and death. However it is also fortold that the “legacy” of the of the lady one day will win and smash the head of the serpent, unto death; and it is foretold that the legacy of the lady-- and in her the lady and our same mother-- will win, through man, God will win. If together with the Church we place ourselves in waiting ahead of this test, we thus may begin to understand what original sin is, the hereditary sin, and also what is the safreguard from this hereditary sin, that which is redemption.
 
Paragraph 6 (translation a bit shaky on this one):

Which is the portrait which in this page is placed before us? Man does not trust humself in God. He, lured from the words of the serpent, harbors suspicion that God, at the end of the count, cuts him off from something of his life, that God is a competitor who limits our liberty and that we will be fully human only when we have put him aside; therefore, only in this way we can realize in fullness of our liberty. Man lives in the suspicion that the love of God creates a dependency and that it is necessary for him to get rid of this dependence in order to be full of himself. Man does not want to receive from God his existence and the fullness of his life. He wants to tap into himself from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself god, elevating himself to His level, and to win over with his own force death and darknesses. He does not want to count on God’s love which to him does not seem reliable; he counts only on knowledge, to the degree that as God’s love confers power upon him. Instead of love, he points to power with which he wants to lead his own life his own hands in an independent manner. And in doing this, he trusts himself in falsity instead of truth and with this sinks with his life into emptiness, into death. Love is not dependence, but a gift which brings us into existence. The liberty of the human being is the liberty of a limited being and is therefore limited to itself. We can have it only as shared liberty, in the communion of liberties: only if we live in a just way with one another and for one another, liberty can develop itself. We live in a just way, if we live according to the truth of our being, namely, according to the will of God. Because the will of God is not a law imposed for man from the external, but is an intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure which is written in him and renders him in the image of God and are thereby free creatures. If we live against love and against truth-- agaisnt God-- then we destroy ourselves mutually and we destroy the world. Thus let us not find life, but let us make an intrest of death. All this is recounted with the immortal immages in the story of the original fall and of the expulsion of man from the worldly paradise.
 
7th Paragraph:

Dear brothers and sisters! If we reflect sincerely on ourselves and on this history, we must say that with this recounting is described not only the history of the beginning, but the history of all times, and that we all carry inside of us a drop of poison of this way of thinking illustrated in the images of the Book of Genesis. This drop of poison is called original sin. Even on the feast of the Immaculate Conception emerges in us a suspicion wihch a person who does not transgress matter is in deep boredom; he who misses something in his life: the dramatic dimension of being independent; which makes part of the true being of men the liberty of saying no, to descend him lower into the darknesses of sin and want; that only then one can exploit until at heart all the vastness and the profundity of our human existence, of being truly ourselves; that we must put this liberty to the test against God in order to become in reality fullly of ourselves. With a word, we think that evil at its heart is good, which of it, at least a bit, we need to experience the fullness of being. We think that Mephistocles-- the tempter-- is right when he says of being the force “which always wants evil and always does good”. We think that bargaining a little with evil, reserving some freedom against God, is good, perhaps even necessary.
 
Hi there Fidei Defensor…
I am really appreciating your translations of the homily of The Holy Father on the Feast of The Immaculate Conception…also marvelling at your abilities with Italian!

I did think it strange that The Holy Father would speak of Vatican2 on The Feast of The Immaculate Conception and not Our Lady specifically.

Since Chiesa Rome did state that The Holy Father would be making a statement about Vatican2 on the 8th. December and The Immaculate Conception, I have sent off an email to them asking for the link where I can find a translation, if one yet is currently available and The Holy Father speaking about Vatican2 as their article indicated.

When and if they reply and hopefully giving a link to the Vatican2 translation as above I will post it.

In the meantime our reportedly shy and retiring man who is our Pope and I have read thinks his role as Pope is not to be writing endless encyclicals, when he does speak is well worth the ‘listening’ to indeed - hence your translations Fidei Defensor are much appreciated and read…

Good luck with your studies, altho it does seem to me you have mastered them already…

Barb:)
 
Again, Barb, thanks for the compliments.
8th paragraph:

Watching however the world within outselves, we must see that it is not so, that namely evil always poisons, not enhances man, but lowers him and humiliates him, it does not render him more rich, more pure, and more rich, but it damages and makes him become much smaller. This we must learn instead on the day of the Immaculate: the man who abandons himself totally in the hands of God does not become a puppet of God, a boring, submissive person. He does not lose his liberty. Only the man who trusts himself totally to God finds true liberty, the great and creative vastness of the liberty of good. The man who turns himself to God does not become much smaller, but much bigger, because thanks to God and together with Him man becomes great, becomes divine, becomes truly himself. The man who places himself in the hands of God does not move himself away from others, withdrawing himself in his own private salvation; on the contrary, only then does his heart truly awakens itself and he becomes a sensible person and therefore benevolent and opened.
 
BarbaraTherese said:
http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=43223&eng=y

This article is somehat lengthy and there are also interesting links at the end of it. There may be some interest in it and perhaps comments that will come out of a read of the article etc. Personally I do hope for great things of Pope Benedict and sorting out all the internal conflict re Vatican2 is moving in that area to my mind.
I am quoting herein only a portion of the article.
Included in the article on the above link is another article written by The President of the Pontifical Committee for Historic Sciences, Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, which is very interesting indeed and which The Holy Father apparently commented on in a homily delivered on 8th. December 2005. If time permits I will try and locate that homily and post it into the thread, unless another member locates it and posts it first.

FWIW - here is that article mentioned in your post: catholiccitizens.org/press/contentview.asp?c=30327​

Scroll down about half way ##
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The conclusion of the Pope’s Immaculate Conception homily; paragraphs 9 and 10:

*The more man is closer to God, the more closer God is to men. We see it in Mary. The fact that she is totally near God is the reason for this and thus she is also close to men. Through this may sh be the Mother of all consolation and of all help, a Mother to which in whatever neccesity anyone can dare to turn himself into his own weakness, into his own sin, because she (Mary) has understood through everyone and is for everyone an open force of creative goodness. It is in her that God imprints his own image, the image of He who follows the lost sheep into the mountains and into the thorns and branches of the sins of this world, leaving himself hurt from the thorns and branches of these sins, in order to take the sheep upon his shoulders and bring it home. Like the mother who has pity, Mary is the anticipated figure and the permanent image of the Son. And thus we see that also the image of Our Lady of Sorrows, of the mother who partakes of suffering and love, is a true image of the Immaculate. Her crown, through hearing and being together with God, augments itself. In her the goodness of God is itself brought closer and brings itself very close to us. Thus Mary is before us as a sign of consolation, of encouragement, of hope. She turns to herself to us saying “Have the courage to dare make bold with God! Show us! Do not be afraid of Him! Have the corage to risk with the faith! Have the courage to risk with goodness! Have the courage to risk with your pure heart! Place yourself with God, so that you will see that approproate with with your lofe becomes broad and illuminated, not boring, but full of infinite surprises, because the infinite goodness of God never exhausts itself!”.

We want, on this feast day, to thank the Lord for the great sign for his love which he has given to us in Mary, His Mother and the Mother of the Church. We want to pray to put this sign, Mary, on our way as a light which also helps us to become a light, and to bring this light to the nights of history. Amen.*
 
Gottle of Geer said:
## FWIW - here is that article mentioned in your post: catholiccitizens.org/press/contentview.asp?c=30327

Scroll down about half way ##
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Hi again, Michael…thank you for the above link and I did have a look but it is pretty much the same as the link I posted to open this thread and the article you are quoting in the link also mentions that The Holy Father is to make a statement re Vatican2 on 8.12.05 and his statement is what I cannot find. I am hoping at some point a statement or homily on Vatican2 by Pope Benedict will be translated somewhere and to that end I have sent an email to the source of the article I quoted, asking can they give me link to Pope Benedict’s statement or homily.

Trust that makes some sense!

Barb:)
 
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