E
Eric_Olsen
Guest
not sure if this is the correct forum, but here it is anyway.
This is a good article and needs to be looked at in light of all
the problems since the council. It is an older article but I think it still drives the point home.
ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/jhitchcock_vatican2_feb08.asp
In many ways the promise of the Second Vatican Council has not been fulfilled, and most of this failure is traceable to fundamental misunderstandings of its intentions, to the very meaning of the process called “renewal.” Some of this misunderstanding is sincere, but some has also been deliberate, on the part of people who know that the Council did not authorize the changes they wanted but who pretend that it did.
Often unnoticed is the fact that there were two different ways of understanding the Council’s reforming efforts, approaches which are not contradictory but which do move in different directions. A common term for post-conciliar reform was “aggiornamento,” an Italian word meaning “updating,” which conveyed the need for the Church to adjust itself to historical change, to make evangelization more effective by relating to the needs of the modern world. Less commonly used, and probably unfamiliar to most Catholics, was the French word “ressourcement”—“return to the sources”—which saw reform as recovering the earliest roots of the Faith, judging later developments by the criterion of authoritative early teachings. The dominant thrust of the conciliar decrees was the latter, and there is scarcely a passage anywhere in them which is not supported by references to Scripture, and sometimes to the Fathers of the Church.
But advocates of unlimited change have espoused an extreme form of aggiornamento. Realizing that the Council did not support their agenda, they quickly got into the habit of speaking of the “spirit” of the Council, which is said to transcend its actual statements and even in some cases to contradict them. Since there is no authoritative way by which this “spirit” can be determined, it has been invoked to justify virtually whatever any particular individual happens to want.
The post-conciliar crisis cannot be understood unless it is recalled that, almost immediately at the Council’s end, but for the most part undetectable while the Council was still in session, there occurred the world-wide cultural crisis called “the Sixties,” which was nothing less than a frontal assault on all forms of authority, at all levels of society.
Confused by the conciliar changes, and unable to grasp the subtle theology of the conciliar decrees, many Catholics simply translated the conciliar reforms into the terms of “the counter-culture,” which was essentially the demand for “liberation” from all restraint on personal freedom. Had the Council been held a decade earlier, during the much more stable l950s, it is likely that the post-conciliar upheaval would have been far less severe. (The most perplexing question about the post-conciliar period is why the hierarchy made so little effort to insure that the faithful were educated as to the Council’s authentic meaning, and why the hierarchy failed to insure the authenticity of those programs which claimed to do so.)
Thus, at a time when authority was being assaulted on all levels, many people interpreted concepts like “the people of God” simply in terms of democracy. Their agenda for “reform” became one of intense opposition to the teaching authority of the Church, often to the point of advocating in effect that doctrine be determined by majority opinion.
Initially liturgical change was urged on a reluctant laity by insisting that those changes marked a return to the practices of the early Church and thus represented a more authentic understanding. But quickly the agenda changed to one of making liturgy “relevant,” which meant conforming it as closely as possible to contemporary culture — in language, ritual practices (balloons, dancing), and music. For many people liturgy lost its entire supernatural dimension and was reduced to a communal celebration whose meaning is exhausted by the subjective effect it has on the participants…
see link above for more.
This is a good article and needs to be looked at in light of all
the problems since the council. It is an older article but I think it still drives the point home.
ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/jhitchcock_vatican2_feb08.asp
In many ways the promise of the Second Vatican Council has not been fulfilled, and most of this failure is traceable to fundamental misunderstandings of its intentions, to the very meaning of the process called “renewal.” Some of this misunderstanding is sincere, but some has also been deliberate, on the part of people who know that the Council did not authorize the changes they wanted but who pretend that it did.
Often unnoticed is the fact that there were two different ways of understanding the Council’s reforming efforts, approaches which are not contradictory but which do move in different directions. A common term for post-conciliar reform was “aggiornamento,” an Italian word meaning “updating,” which conveyed the need for the Church to adjust itself to historical change, to make evangelization more effective by relating to the needs of the modern world. Less commonly used, and probably unfamiliar to most Catholics, was the French word “ressourcement”—“return to the sources”—which saw reform as recovering the earliest roots of the Faith, judging later developments by the criterion of authoritative early teachings. The dominant thrust of the conciliar decrees was the latter, and there is scarcely a passage anywhere in them which is not supported by references to Scripture, and sometimes to the Fathers of the Church.
But advocates of unlimited change have espoused an extreme form of aggiornamento. Realizing that the Council did not support their agenda, they quickly got into the habit of speaking of the “spirit” of the Council, which is said to transcend its actual statements and even in some cases to contradict them. Since there is no authoritative way by which this “spirit” can be determined, it has been invoked to justify virtually whatever any particular individual happens to want.
The post-conciliar crisis cannot be understood unless it is recalled that, almost immediately at the Council’s end, but for the most part undetectable while the Council was still in session, there occurred the world-wide cultural crisis called “the Sixties,” which was nothing less than a frontal assault on all forms of authority, at all levels of society.
Confused by the conciliar changes, and unable to grasp the subtle theology of the conciliar decrees, many Catholics simply translated the conciliar reforms into the terms of “the counter-culture,” which was essentially the demand for “liberation” from all restraint on personal freedom. Had the Council been held a decade earlier, during the much more stable l950s, it is likely that the post-conciliar upheaval would have been far less severe. (The most perplexing question about the post-conciliar period is why the hierarchy made so little effort to insure that the faithful were educated as to the Council’s authentic meaning, and why the hierarchy failed to insure the authenticity of those programs which claimed to do so.)
Thus, at a time when authority was being assaulted on all levels, many people interpreted concepts like “the people of God” simply in terms of democracy. Their agenda for “reform” became one of intense opposition to the teaching authority of the Church, often to the point of advocating in effect that doctrine be determined by majority opinion.
Initially liturgical change was urged on a reluctant laity by insisting that those changes marked a return to the practices of the early Church and thus represented a more authentic understanding. But quickly the agenda changed to one of making liturgy “relevant,” which meant conforming it as closely as possible to contemporary culture — in language, ritual practices (balloons, dancing), and music. For many people liturgy lost its entire supernatural dimension and was reduced to a communal celebration whose meaning is exhausted by the subjective effect it has on the participants…
see link above for more.