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64 pages

English

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The ideal TAN book! The resurgence of tradition is rekindling devotion, zeal and, we pray, sanctity. But do some place traditionalism before Mother Church herself? This is the issue of our time a unique time, 50 years after Vatican II when much (though not all) of the misapplication of the Council s teaching and the liturgical aberrations have settled. In The Council in Question: A Dialogue With Catholic Traditionalism, journalist Moyra Doorly, an SSPX attendee and Dominican Aidan Nichols engage in a vibrant and enlightening discussion on the health and future of the Roman Catholic Church. Doorly takes up the arguments of the Society of Saint Pius X, while Nichols picks up the mantel of the post-Vatican II Church. This fascinating exchange is more than just a dialogue between two factions of the Church, it is a sign and defense of the genuine continuity and development across the millennia in doctrine, liturgy, and church law. A must-read for lovers of Tradition. US and CA distribution only.

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Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

Catholic Church

Christianity

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	28 mars 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780895559913
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0374€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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This edition originally published in England by Gracewing.
Copyright © 2011 Moyra Doorly and Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P.
Retypeset and published in 2013 by TAN Books, an Imprint of Saint Benedict Press, LLC, Charlotte, North Carolina, with Americanization of word spelling.
The rights of Moyra Doorly and Aidan Nichols, O.P. to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Milo Persic.
Front cover image: Second Vatican Council Convened in 196 3 (photo), St. Peter’s, Vatican City, The Bridgeman Art Library. Back cover image: Council of Bishops on Saint Peter’s Square, October 11, 1961, Wikimedia Commons.
Cataloging-in-Publication data on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-89555-268-6
Published in the United States by TAN Books An Imprint of Saint Benedict Press, LLC P.O. Box 410487 Charlotte, NC 28241 www.tanbooks.com
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
C ONTENTS
Foreword
The Making of a Debate: A View from the Official Church
The Coming of the Controversy: The Society’s Perspective
First Letter from a Confused Catholic: On the Reform of the Roman Liturgy
A First Reply to a Confused Catholic
Second Letter from a Confused Catholic: On the Eucharistic Doctrine of the Missal of Pope Paul VI
A Second Reply to a Confused Catholic
Third Letter from a Confused Catholic: On the Idea of Tradition
A Third Reply to a Confused Catholic
Fourth Letter from a Confused Catholic: On the Continuity with Tradition of the Second Vatican Council
A Fourth Reply to a Confused Catholic
Fifth Letter from a Confused Catholic: On Ecumenism
A Fifth Reply to a Confused Catholic
Sixth Letter from a Confused Catholic: On Inter-Religious Dialogue
A Sixth Reply to a Confused Catholic
Seventh Letter from a Confused Catholic: On Religious Liberty
A Seventh Reply to a Confused Catholic
One Last Letter from a Confused Catholic
A Final but Not Necessarily Conclusive Reply
F OREWORD
RECENTLY I have been reading Eamon Duffy’s Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (2009) which recounts the heroic efforts of Queen Mary and Cardinal Reginald Pole, Archbishop of Canterbury, to replant the Catholic Faith in England and how they nearly succeeded. One cause of anguish as I read of the changing circumstances in this struggle was the officially endorsed burning of Protestants, often simpleminded heroes who could not be dissuaded. Both sides, Catholic and Protestant, believed it just and sometimes necessary to eliminate their opponents. St. Thomas More was responsible for a number of Protestant deaths.
All Christians today have radically different sensibilities from our sixteenth-century Christian brothers and sisters who were pro-burning. This is progress, a genuine and homogeneous doctrinal development which spells out better the consequences of the Gospel. Vatican II was correct to acknowledge the rights of persons not to be coerced by the State in their religious convictions.
Much more could be said about these facts, on human dignity, Christendom and the coercive powers of State and Church to remind us that learned dialogue has to be seen in wider theological and cultural perspectives. All Christians are nourished by the Scriptures and Catholics reverence the teachings of Popes and Councils, while the historical, political and public relations consequences of doctrinal and disciplinary developments have to be carefully considered—better than we have done recently.
The stimulating debate in this book is like a tennis match between Trent and Vatican II, between two players with strongly contrasting styles. Trent has a powerful and well-placed serve, the occasional devastating smash, and volleys efficiently at the net when she gets into position. Vatican II possesses only an ordinary serve, but plays a wide variety of strokes including topspin, and is fast and agile around the court. On some occasions Father Nichols had to work hard to keep the ball in play but he was regularly successful.
Without doubt the Catholic Church everywhere in the English-speaking world is now very different from the Church of the 1950s. The bigger changes came from outside pressures, e.g., the pill, and the consequent permissive revolution, the coarsening of standards in the new media, and hostile legislation. But many Catholic communities have been guilty also of self-harm, ignorantly encouraging the secularization of institutions. When the reforms of Vatican II were imposed, unexpected consequences followed, especially when leaders were naïve and optimistic, underestimating the virulence of hostile forces and overestimating Catholic vitality and influence. The crux of the discussion is whether this self-harm came from illegitimate appeals to “the spirit of Vatican II” or can be sheeted home to doctrinal errors in the Council teachings.
We now have situations which are historically novel, indeed bizarre in a couple of opposite ways. Some still insist on calling themselves Catholic when they reject most of the Church’s teaching on life, marriage and sexuality and regard the Pope and Bishops as hindrances (or irrelevant) to their modernizing projects. We had one priest in Australia who generated considerable publicity before he left his parish because he rejected the Judeo-Christian concept of God as tribal and rejected the divinity of Christ who, he felt, might not have existed. For years he claimed to be Catholic.
On the other hand, with the Society of St. Pius X we have devout believers who accept the Tradition but face resolutely at the same time in different directions by separating themselves from the legitimate authority of Pope and the Council, while also speaking as though they were more Catholic than the Pope, prepared to “write the creed with their own blood.”
I fear that the term “official Church” increases the confusion. For years I have refused to use it, because there is no such thing as “the official Church,” especially if contrasted with local “spontaneous” communities. The one Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches and other ecclesial communities all have officials, but that is a different matter.
This fascinating exchange is a significant contribution to the official dialogue between Rome and Ecône but is of wider significance in searching out the nature of genuine continuity and development across the millennia in doctrine, liturgy, and church law; and in devising pastoral strategies for handing on the faith and for re-evangelization.
It is a lively reminder that none of us can take refuge in fundamentalisms, and deserves to be read widely.
George Cardinal Pell Archbishop of Sydney Feast of St. Vincent de Paul 27 September 2010

T HE M AKING OF A D EBATE : A V IEW FROM THE O FFICIAL C HURCH
THINKING ahead to his coming Council (Vatican II, 1962–1965), Pope John XXIII described it as devoted to the “enlightenment, edification, and joy of the entire Christian people.” At around the same time, the Archbishop of Milan, who would become, as Paul VI, the second (and last) pope of the Council, gave vent to his fear it would stir up a ‘hornets’ nest.” Both predictions were, up to a point, correct. The exchange of letters in this book bears witness to that.
What, we may ask, was the aim, initially, of the Second Vatican Council? The answer is not easy to give because John XXIII—whose personal brainchild it was—gave rather conflicting signals about the contents of his own mind. But we should not go far wrong if we included in our answer a trio of goals. They were: giving inspiration for the Church’s witness to the contemporary world; providing an impetus to the reunion of Christians; recovering more fully some ancient features of the Tradition (a more rounded reading of the Bible, knowledge of the Fathers, and early Christian spirituality—including liturgical spirituality—would have figured among the “features” concerned). It is likely that the Pope expected the Council, to some degree, to define itself. When, by its documents, it did so, it became apparent that the first and the third of the goals just suggested, soon to be dubbed, in a borrowing from, respectively, Italian— aggiornamento or “bringing up to date”—and French— ressourcement or “going back to the sources”—did indeed describe what the Council’s overall presentation of Catholicism was meant to achieve.
At the same time, the second goal, ecumenism, though chiefly confined to one document in particular, became in popular perception, at any rate in Western countries, the Second Vatican Council’s most distinctive mark. I should add, somewhat as a parenthesis, that Pope John’s decision to call the Council the Second Council of the Vatican has also been taken to imply that he expected the assembly of bishops to complete the unfinished work of the (abruptly interrupted) First Vatican Council (1869–1870) by providing a fuller account of the nature of the Church—and not least of the position of the episcopate vis-à-vis the Papacy.
In conformity to Pope John’s (probable) expectation, the Conciliar event did develop a momentum of its own, assisted by the optimistic cultural setting of the early 1960s. It was an era dominated by an ideology of “development” in the social economy, globally speaking, and—despite the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—an atmosphere of détente (“relaxation”) between its competing superpowers. Pope John told his former clergy and people in Venice that the Council would further “clarity of thought and magnanimity of heart.” As optimism turned to hedonism, the Western culture of the 60s encouraged more of the second than the first.
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