Mandi & Catholic Eagle: You both need to seperate Vatican 2 from the official implementation of the Decrees, and that from the unofficial implementation of Vatican 2. If you can’t seperate those three things, it will be difficult to have an intelligent discussion of the issue at hand, to wit: there are some people who say the “Fruits of Vatican 2” show it was a bad council.
I say that the true fruits of Vatican 2 include the ecumenical work with both the Orthodx Churches, and the Lutherans. They also include, for example, the change in view of ecclesiology, that the bishops, in union with the Pope, are the direct descendants sacramentally from the Apostles (and I will grant that a few look perhaps more like Judas). The list goes on and on. However, people don’t seem much interested in the official implementation of the Decrees. The focus seems mainly on the unofficial “implementation” of the Decrees; those seem to have the phrase “spirit of Vatican 2” often attached.
I grow weary of people’s inability to distinguish a true abuse (e.g. trying to consecrate invalid matter) from issues of holding hands during the Our Father (see, for example, Chaput’s response). I am as tired of the attacks from the Conservatives as from the Liberals. The Ordo Missae is just fine. I remember the “abuses” i witnessed as a child and teenager of the Tridentine Mass, and some of them were more egregious to me than all the hand holding you can complain about.
Are there still true abuses occuring? Of course. I am neither blind nor deaf. Are they lessening? They appear to be, not as fast as I would have it, but given that the abuses since Vatican 2 have occured for less than 2% of the time the Church has been on the face of the earth, and given they are not, in any sense of the truth, the only abuses that have ever occured in that 2000 years, I find that a bit of perspective helps the attitude. True abuse needs to be rooted out. For the things you don’t like, you might try Christian charity.
ILdoc82: I am not sure what you are referring to by “silliness” overtaking seminaries and the USCCB; can you be more specific? As to many of your other charges, again, the Liberals have taken flight somewhere off the far edge of the earth. I try to seperate out what is truly an implemntation, and what is some liberal’s opinion of what implementation should look like.
The biggest difficulty I have with a number of the respondents within some of these threads is that if Vatican 2 were implemented correctly and fully today, it would still be rejected, because these respondents have a mindset of what the Church looks like, and they consider it immutable. They cannot seperate form and substance; they have the most myopic view of the history of the Church possible, and they appear more interested in feeling holy than in the challenge of being holy. By that, I mean that i get a distinct feeling that “holiness” appears, from their comments, to mean an emotional religious “fix” they get from a certain style of worship. God is much more solemn, profound, awesome, whatever, as a transcendent God than as an imminent God. God is both. Granted that the pendulum has swung too hard in the transcendent quarter, it is not either/or, but both/and.
