I would say doctrinal would be number 1 and obedience would be number 2. They sort of overlap.
Because he’s a theologian not God. He cannot explain it all. As John Henry Newman said, we have to allow for the development of doctrine. Here’s what he meant. You have a chestnut. In that chestnut there is a tree. But you can’t see it. However, you know it’s there. If you plant the seed, water it, protect it from the elements, little by little, the leaves will show themselves, then a little plant, then a bush and then a small tree, etc. There is nothing new. It was always there, but it had to be allowed to grow.
This explanation doesn’t sit well with me, brother JR. The SSPX insists that there was at least the appearance of doctrinal rupture. Likewise, certain leftist forces insist that there was doctrinal rupture. I would say the belief that Vatican II at least appeared doctrinally discontinuous is a majority belief in the Church right now (an assessment recently endorsed by Abp. Marchetto). The main difference between the two camps is whether they behold the apparent rupture with joy or distress; neither disagree about the extent, nature, or source of the rupture.
Obviously, both are wrong – both *must *be wrong, or else the Church is no longer the Church. There is no need to wait for development: they are both talking about the seeds the Council planted, and they are both wrong in their evaluation of it. The tree and the fruits it produces are second-order considerations. Both think the crookedness of the tree and toxic character of its fruits ratify their prejudices regarding the seed from which they sprang. I have a hard time believing that the question of what 3,000 bishops (at least some of whom, including the Pope, are still alive) who came together and agreed on 15 or 16 conciliar documents walked away with no firm idea re: what they actually mean. It’s not a big mystery. We’re talking about the text of documents that are available to us and the (name removed by moderator)ut of men who participated in the process. Perhaps the Pope cannot declare “the teachings of Vatican II consist in X and solely in X.” But surely he can guide the discussion in the right direction.
Other things that were done by the Council were simply to give pastoral recommendations of how to apply what the Church has always taught. In other words, the dogmas were already in place. What needed to be put in place were pastoral practices that would bring those dogmas to the world in a manner that the world could understand them and adhere to them. Those are called pastoral recommendations. These pastoral recommendations were about things that were in place from the past.
This reads like something I read recently, that both John XXIII and Paul VI believed that Vatican II was an experiment in relating traditional teachings to the world. In other words, they didn’t change doctrine, they just changed the way we talk about doctrine.
If that’s all the issue is, why is there a doctrinal problem between the SSPX and Rome? That is, if the SSPX’s “doctrinal problem” is reducible to a misinterpretation of admittedly extremely ambiguous language, why don’t we just clarify the language? Given that this way of speaking about things has purchased us horrible catechesis, widespread ignorance of and dissent from Church teachings, etc., this sounds like good policy, anyway. Surely this is something the Pope has the authority to do. He was there at the Council. He contributed to it. He gets it.
That was done by Bl. John Paul II, many times.
Can you point me in the direction of such? I was struggling a few months ago to reconcile DH with older Church teachings and they surely would’ve come in handy.
Why, in any event, have such clarifications not ended the “doctrinal problem”? Why does virtually everyone still think the Church says something it doesn’t say?
I recall not long ago reading a thread on CAF in which a young traditionalist pointed out that DH does not establish a right to false worship, but only limits to the right of the state to insist on Catholic worship (such that they cannot, for instance, prohibit religious worship simply for being false). It remains the case, he said, that every man is obligated to seek out and believe the truth, i.e., Catholicism, and that there is no right to falsehood or error, and that DH does not contradict this. Now this is, to me, the only way to understand DH in a manner that is doctrinally continuous with earlier Church teachings. But he was roundly criticized and demonized for this, and ultimately even banned (although that may have had more to do with his flirtation with sedevacantism, which I gather is frowned on strongly here).
To muddy the waters further, I read recently that Cardinal Brandmuller (not, to my knowledge, a traditionalist crazy) says that neither Dignitatis Humanae nor Nostra Aetate have no “binding doctrinal content.” So not only is it not immediately clear what we’re supposed to believe about DH and NA, it’s not even clear if we should bother consulting them at all.
It’s also a banned topic here.
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