Can you be in Communion with Rome if you disagree with some parts of Vatican 2?

[tqualey]

Hi Link0126,

I do not think Archangelzx said or even implied this. Given the thread we are on, the idea is to closely united with the Holy Father as the Vicar of Christ on Earth. All definitive teachings from the Holy Father are without error.

God bless

No, that would be Christ himself, and Christ is not bound. He can save anyone he chooses.

 

[Fan_of_Trent]

So I have been visiting Catholic Forums for a while but now I have decided to join the Forums and start making posts. I go to a Roman Rite Catholic Church for Mass and I am canonically part of the Roman Rite but at home and in my heart I pray the prayers in the Byzantine style. In general I at least pray a reader’s version of the Typika daily since most of the Byzantine Liturgical Hours are quite long if prayed properly. The Typika is the Roman Rite version of the Liturgy of the Word in the OF Mass.

I am a fairly traditional Catholic as well. I have been Catholic now for over 5 years; I converted in college from being a Baptist but I was only Baptist for about a year and before that I didn’t really have any faith in Christ. Over the years I have been struggling with Vatican 2. I almost became Orthodox (Orthodox Church in America) a couple years ago but while they have a great liturgy their politics and administration leave something to be desired and I realized how important the Papacy is and I always believed in the Immaculate Conception. So I returned to the Catholic Church and that is also why I now prefer to worship in the Byzantine Rite among other reasons.

So I now finally get to the point that I wanted to make. I wanted to verify if a certain position I have is considered to be in alignment with the Holy Catholic Church. I feel that this post Vatican 2 age is one of the “four dark ages of the Church.” I define a dark age to be a time period where the Church is almost wiped out. The first period I define is the time of Arianism around the First Nicene Council. Many bishops, clergy, and laypeople did not accept the divinity of Christ and even the Bishop of Alexandria excommunicated St. Athanasius to which he was restored later. The second period is the time of Iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Icons were almost wiped out and it was Rome that saved the day in those times. The third period I say is around the 15th century when some of the Popes and clergy were so corrupted that I just find it amazing that we made it out alive through the Council of Trent.

So now we come to our age and day. There are parts of Vatican 2 that I do not accept and I do not believe the council to be ecumenical. I do not accept ecumenism or religious freedom and while I do accept the validity of the new Roman Mass I do not prefer it. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Way the Truth and the Life and that Christ is necessary for Salvation.

So I want to work to restore the Church to the way things were before Vatican 2. I want to cling to the Pope of Rome through what I consider these dark and turbulent times just like in times past.

Are these beliefs heretical or can a Catholic genuinely feel this way and be in line with the Catholic Church?

Seems you are unaware pronouncements emanating from an ecumencial council (and subsequently ratified by the pope) can never be heretical as this would contradict the indefectibility of the Church promised by Our Lord?

I have heard various positions on rather Vatican 2 is considered to be ecumenical or not. My position is that it is not. Vatican 2 is unlike any other ecumenical council in the past i.e. there is no critical issue facing the life of Church. Also an ecumenical council cannot teach heresy. We cannot teach people that its ok to choose whatever religion you want or that every religion is as good as the next. In much of the second millennium it was considered a major sin to pray with heretics and schismatics and now we are encouraged to that after Vatican 2. We now even have a Bible that was worked on together with Protestants and Catholics (the New American Bible).

At the same time I do not have hatred towards non-Catholics. I believe there are some things we can do with Protestants and non-Catholic religions like helping the poor but when it comes to prayer and worship I feel that there should be some separation.

IMHO the whole problem (and it’s a big one) regarding the documents at Vatican II were not so much the documents proper, per se, but the very ambiguous manner in which many of them were drafted. For example, Sacrosanctum Concilium or at least parts thereof, are so open to interpretation that almost anything is possible. Thus is born the “Spirit of Vatican II”. This phrase is overused and seems to have no fixed definition and this has, in my opinion, led to some of the “innovations” in the Church the one often comes across today. The post-conciliar products and “reforms” weren’t necessarily what the Bishops had envisioned when the original documents were approved. Ambiguity, however, does not ipso facto invalidate a document promulgated by a Pope(s). They’re valid, and I (have to) accept that. Finding the continuity of Church teachings, more so in some documents than others but especially in a couple of the more controversial ones such as Nostra Aetate, is something I find quite challenging and I know I’m not the only Catholic who finds them as such.

I think what is needed is a set of firm guidelines on interpretation, a definitive point of reference by which the documents could be more accurately and consistently interpreted throughout the world. I was glad to hear there is a newly released book (not yet in english as far as I know) dealing specifically with interpreting the teachings of Vatican II:

“A book release took place recently at a press conference in Vatican City. The book, entitled ‘Le “Chiavi” di Benedetto XVI per interpretare il Vaticano II’ (Benedict XVI’s ‘keys’ for interpreting the Second Vatican Council) was written by Church historian Walter Cardinal Brandmüller, Archbishop Agostino Marchetto and theologian Don Nicola Bux. Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said, ‘If a theologian wishes to interpret the Second Vatican Council, with reference solely to documents, without considering the historical context, it cannot be done adequately.’ Archbishop Marchetto emphasized the essential continuity between this Council and those that preceded it. This continuity is the key to putting this Council into context and saving it, and the Church, from the idea that its teachings amount to a ‘super-dogma’ which make all that preceded it of relatively little significance.”

Perhaps (hopefully) this publication will be of some assistance, but the issues are massive and globally pervasive. At the end of the day, one cannot hold that there is more than one absolute truth. It goes against all logic, sense and historical Church teachings. It’s much like a test with true or false questions. There are two distinct boxes, one for true and one for false, but there’s only one right answer. I’ve yet to run across one that has other options such as “not fully true” or “true, subject to…” or “not entirely false”. I recommend reading Pope Pius X’s encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which is very applicable to this topic.

Regardless of anything though, Christ promised that the gates of hell shall never prevail against that which He founded – the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Deo Gratias

 

[Justin_Swanton]

It appears that the consensus of opinion in at least part of the higher echelons of the Church is this:

1. Vatican II is as much an ecumenical council as the councils that preceded it.
2. It did not promulgate any new dogmas, nonetheless its pronouncements on Faith and Morals are part of the Ordinary Magisterium and must be accepted as such.
3. Any ambiguous texts that touch on Faith or Morals must be interpreted in the light of the Church’s constant teaching on the subject. Indeed there may be a need for authoritative interpretative pronouncements on these texts.
4. Parts of the Council documents, by admission of the Council itself, contain matter that is not of Faith and Morals. They are not binding. Some of these are flawed and may be openly criticized.

Hence the affirmation by Cardinal Brandmuller that Vatican II’s decrees on non-Christian religions (Nostra Aetate) and Religious Freedom (Dignitatas Humanae) “do not have a binding doctrinal content, so one can dialogue about them.”

Hence also his affirmation that all of the Conciliar documents “must be taken seriously as an expression of the living Magisterium”.

This I think is the common ground between the SSPX and Rome. If I’m not mistaken the difficulties lie in the kind of interpretation that is to be applied to some of the problem texts of the Council. But I’m not in the know.

 

[sw85]

So now we come to our age and day. There are parts of Vatican 2 that I do not accept and I do not believe the council to be ecumenical. I do not accept ecumenism or religious freedom and while I do accept the validity of the new Roman Mass I do not prefer it. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Way the Truth and the Life and that Christ is necessary for Salvation.

So I want to work to restore the Church to the way things were before Vatican 2. I want to cling to the Pope of Rome through what I consider these dark and turbulent times just like in times past.

Are these beliefs heretical or can a Catholic genuinely feel this way and be in line with the Catholic Church?

It’s hard to tell in what places Vatican II promulgated new teachings and in what places it simply expressed old teachings in different ways.

The nearest I can tell is that the places in which Vatican II actually taught something new, it was on relatively obscure matters irrelevant to the immediate life of Catholic laity – things like the sacramentality of episcopal consecrations, for instance. In everything else, it appears the Council was attempting to express traditional teachings using the language of an incompatible philosophy (modern liberalism), presumably in an order to make Catholicism more accessible to the modern mind.

My opinion is that this effort has failed catastrophically and ought to be repudiated, and since it was only a prudential matter and not a doctrinal one to begin with, this can be done without reflecting on the Church’s teaching authority. What one is teaching is an independent question of how well one is teaching it: by the above logic, the real problem with Vatican II is not the former but the latter.

So I think any judgment regarding denial of this or that teaching being “heresy” is probably premature, since there seems to be no clear consensus about what Vatican II actually did teach that was new or original. These things take time to work out, and very likely no one here will still be alive by the time a firm and coherent doctrinal consensus gels around Vatican II’s teachings.

Not just Vatican II, but also believing that the “new Mass” is heretical… catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=537

Well, they always say that the Mass of Paul VI was a fruit of Vatican II. But does questioning the form of Mass as heretical even though it is a form that the Pope himself celebrate, doesn’t that suggest they are out of communion if they hold to such belief?

This strikes me as an unreasonable objection. Within certain limits, liturgy is not doctrinal, so the idea of a “liturgy protected from error” or a “heretical liturgy” is just bizarre.

The most that can be said is that the Mass reflects doctrine, for instance, because it is a recapitulation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. The new Mass doesn’t deny this fact. At worst, it can be said that it doesn’t express that fact very well (which I think is a sound argument – I didn’t know for my first several months of attending Mass that it was supposed to be a sacrifice). But that’s a prudential judgment, not a doctrinal one. Prudential judgments can be erroneous, but that’s OK, because the Church is not guaranteed to make the best possible decision at every possible moment.

Now, sure, if we scrapped the Eucharist entirely from the Mass and made it into an hour-long reading from Scriptures, one might be on to something. In that case, the Mass would not just be badly representing the truths of the Catholic faith, it would be positively misrepresenting them. That’s why I say liturgy is nondoctrinal within certain limits. It’s clear to me we’re still well within those limits, though.

The simple fact is, Rome has authority over the liturgy. They can do with it what they want. We don’t have to like what they do with it, we just have to accept it. I think the OF Mass is an ugly and inferior product and that adopting it was a prudential error on Paul VI’s part – that while there was a possible world where adopting it would make sense, the world in which Paul VI lived was not such a world. But so what? Paul VI had the right to make it, and his successor has the right to command my obedience.

 

[jam070406]

It’s hard to tell in what places Vatican II promulgated new teachings and in what places it simply expressed old teachings in different ways.

The nearest I can tell is that the places in which Vatican II actually taught something new, it was on relatively obscure matters irrelevant to the immediate life of Catholic laity – things like the sacramentality of episcopal consecrations, for instance. In everything else, it appears the Council was attempting to express traditional teachings using the language of an incompatible philosophy (modern liberalism), presumably in an order to make Catholicism more accessible to the modern mind.

My opinion is that this effort has failed catastrophically and ought to be repudiated, and since it was only a prudential matter and not a doctrinal one to begin with, this can be done without reflecting on the Church’s teaching authority. What one is teaching is an independent question of how well one is teaching it: by the above logic, the real problem with Vatican II is not the former but the latter.

So I think any judgment regarding denial of this or that teaching being “heresy” is probably premature, since there seems to be no clear consensus about what Vatican II actually did teach that was new or original. These things take time to work out, and very likely no one here will still be alive by the time a firm and coherent doctrinal consensus gels around Vatican II’s teachings.

This strikes me as an unreasonable objection. Within certain limits, liturgy is not doctrinal, so the idea of a “liturgy protected from error” or a “heretical liturgy” is just bizarre.

The most that can be said is that the Mass reflects doctrine, for instance, because it is a recapitulation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. The new Mass doesn’t deny this fact. At worst, it can be said that it doesn’t express that fact very well (which I think is a sound argument – I didn’t know for my first several months of attending Mass that it was supposed to be a sacrifice). But that’s a prudential judgment, not a doctrinal one. Prudential judgments can be erroneous, but that’s OK, because the Church is not guaranteed to make the best possible decision at every possible moment.

Now, sure, if we scrapped the Eucharist entirely from the Mass and made it into an hour-long reading from Scriptures, one might be on to something. In that case, the Mass would not just be badly representing the truths of the Catholic faith, it would be positively misrepresenting them. That’s why I say liturgy is nondoctrinal within certain limits. It’s clear to me we’re still well within those limits, though.

The simple fact is, Rome has authority over the liturgy. They can do with it what they want. We don’t have to like what they do with it, we just have to accept it. I think the OF Mass is an ugly and inferior product and that adopting it was a prudential error on Paul VI’s part – that while there was a possible world where adopting it would make sense, the world in which Paul VI lived was not such a world. But so what? Paul VI had the right to make it, and his successor has the right to command my obedience.

What most people on these boards don’t seem to understand when they defend the OF as “the mass the Pope celebrates” and every other such thing, is that Rome has been highly critical of the Masses that have become the norm in most parishes. To claim we should love the Mass at our local parish because the Pope says so is just not reality. The Pope shares the concerns of traditional minded Catholics concerning the state that Mass has degraded to in most parishes.

thetablet.co.uk/blogs/333/18

 

[sw85]

What most people on these boards don’t seem to understand when they defend the OF as “the mass the Pope celebrates” and every other such thing, is that Rome has been highly critical of the Masses that have become the norm in most parishes. To claim we should love the Mass at our local parish because the Pope says so is just not reality. The Pope shares the concerns of traditional minded Catholics concerning the state that Mass has degraded to in most parishes.

thetablet.co.uk/blogs/333/18

Yes, the Pope frowns on abuses. But my point is that the OF Mass in principle is perfectly valid and legitimate, whatever its deficiencies may be, so people who speak as if the OF Mass is “heretical” (whatever that would mean) or invalid or illegitimate or as if the Pope had no right to change the Mass or authority to command obedience to it are just way off-base.

 

[jam070406]

Yes, the Pope frowns on abuses. But my point is that the OF Mass in principle is perfectly valid and legitimate, whatever its deficiencies may be, so people who speak as if the OF Mass is “heretical” (whatever that would mean) or invalid or illegitimate or as if the Pope had no right to change the Mass or authority to command obedience to it are just way off-base.

No doubt!

 

[mytruepower2]

So I have been visiting Catholic Forums for a while but now I have decided to join the Forums and start making posts. I go to a Roman Rite Catholic Church for Mass and I am canonically part of the Roman Rite but at home and in my heart I pray the prayers in the Byzantine style. In general I at least pray a reader’s version of the Typika daily since most of the Byzantine Liturgical Hours are quite long if prayed properly. The Typika is the Roman Rite version of the Liturgy of the Word in the OF Mass.

I am a fairly traditional Catholic as well. I have been Catholic now for over 5 years; I converted in college from being a Baptist but I was only Baptist for about a year and before that I didn’t really have any faith in Christ. Over the years I have been struggling with Vatican 2. I almost became Orthodox (Orthodox Church in America) a couple years ago but while they have a great liturgy their politics and administration leave something to be desired and I realized how important the Papacy is and I always believed in the Immaculate Conception. So I returned to the Catholic Church and that is also why I now prefer to worship in the Byzantine Rite among other reasons.

So I now finally get to the point that I wanted to make. I wanted to verify if a certain position I have is considered to be in alignment with the Holy Catholic Church. I feel that this post Vatican 2 age is one of the “four dark ages of the Church.” I define a dark age to be a time period where the Church is almost wiped out. The first period I define is the time of Arianism around the First Nicene Council. Many bishops, clergy, and laypeople did not accept the divinity of Christ and even the Bishop of Alexandria excommunicated St. Athanasius to which he was restored later. The second period is the time of Iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Icons were almost wiped out and it was Rome that saved the day in those times. The third period I say is around the 15th century when some of the Popes and clergy were so corrupted that I just find it amazing that we made it out alive through the Council of Trent.

So now we come to our age and day. There are parts of Vatican 2 that I do not accept and I do not believe the council to be ecumenical. I do not accept ecumenism or religious freedom and while I do accept the validity of the new Roman Mass I do not prefer it. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Way the Truth and the Life and that Christ is necessary for Salvation.

So I want to work to restore the Church to the way things were before Vatican 2. I want to cling to the Pope of Rome through what I consider these dark and turbulent times just like in times past.

Are these beliefs heretical or can a Catholic genuinely feel this way and be in line with the Catholic Church?

There’s no confusion about whether Vatican II was ecumenical. It definitely was.

However, every other specific point you mentioned is still surrounded by a large amount of confusion. Some think the remarks about “religious freedom” were mainly directed specifically at the Russia of the time, which was using its government power to suppress the church, and was not intended to be adopted as doctrine.

In fact, it has been noted that the intended purpose for the council was not, in fact, to address or alter doctrine, but merely to find a new discipline through which to spread the word.

Like yourself, I like the Novus Ordo less than the older forms of the mass, but part of that, I feel, is the loss of Gregorian chant and altar rails, neither of which was prescribed by Vatican II.

I think that for me, the main source of aggravation has been people abusing Vatican II; using it as an excuse to excise things from the mass and the devotional life, which should never have been excised.

But can you believe what you believe and still be a non-heretical Catholic?

If you’re like me, and you see the Pope’s efforts to restore the traditional mass, revive terms like “Church Militant,” etc as a sign of hope, I don’t see any reason why you can’t sit on the things that bother you about the faith for the moment, praying for them to be repaired in the meantime.

Personally having difficulty and struggling with certain teachings of the church is to be expected, and it doesn’t make you a heretic unless you’re trying to preach it to your fellow Catholics. Right now, I think the Pope is doing his best, and needs our support.

 

[Daim3]

catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=537

Well, they always say that the Mass of Paul VI was a fruit of Vatican II. But does questioning the form of Mass as heretical even though it is a form that the Pope himself celebrate, doesn’t that suggest they are out of communion if they hold to such belief?

I think it must have been hard for some people to see the Mass change the way it did in the 70’s and 80’s. There must have been a lot of people who loved it and were shocked to see changes in the venerable traditional of centuries upon centuries (whether they knew about Quo Primum or not). I mean, altars were done away with and replaced with ones that looked more like tables, the priest now faced the people, the order of the mass was changed, the Holy Week liturgy was redone, prayers were removed, the words of Christ were changed from “for many” to “for all”, and on and on. I didn’t actually experience it but, man, this must have been tough on many of the faithful. Considering how drastic these changes were forty years ago, I try to imagine what it must have been like in light of how some people handled the very minor liturgical changes from last year.

However, my understanding is that even Archbishop Lefebvre acknowledged that the New Mass is valid and contains no heresy. But much like some parts of Vatican II, the rubrics of the New Mass approved by Pope Paul VI were written in a way that could be open to interpretation and interpret people did. So much so that the Holy Father felt he had to issue a reform to the reform.

So we arrive back at square one where the problem seems to be people, and parishes and even dioceses, who misread these documents or worse add their own agenda to what they think they say, and then they apply all that and then we have problems that occur.

It sure seems like it. I’ve found that the phrase “in the spirit of Vatican II” often refers to interpretations of imprecise language. As a result, I’m not sure that the springtime for the Faith that was intended by the Council has been its biggest fruit.

I would very much like to see everything return to exactly as it was prior to ‘the changes.’

I would too.