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The Council and Its Aftermath

Dietrich von Hildebrand calls "Ecclesiam Suam" by Pope Paul VI "luminous" and Dogmatic Constitution on the Church "magnificent".   He certainly wasn't targeting the Vatican Council itself in his book, but rather some of the subsequent excrudescences that took its name. 

The Church is always in need of renewal, he says.   Renewal in this context means reform, restoration, elimination of worldly accretions.   Hiistorical examples he gives:

  • The Benedictine and Franciscan reforms (Cluny and St Bernadine)
  • The Council of Trent and other decisive councils
  • reform of St Gregory VII

Other examples could probably be added.

He quotes Vatican II -- Lumen Gentium:

The Council "desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church, and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission.  This it intends to do following faithfully the teachings of previous Councils."  

On the process of renewal in the history of the Church:

"(This) involves, on the one hand, the refutation of heresies, which are continually trying to invade the Church, and, correlatively, an increasingly explicit dogmatic formulation of revealed truth, a process described by Cardinal Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine."

From this perspective, Vatican II's aim was to divest the Church of a certain legalism and rigidity that had crept in, which was secular in its origin and risked strangling the true life of the Church.    Remember from the past chapter that he had named a third way apart from "progressive" and "reactionary".   This is the "instaurare omnia in Christo".   On one hand, expansion of understanding and expression of what has been handed down; on the other hand, discarding anything false that has been brought in.

At this point, he doesn't explain exactly of what the legalism and rigidity consisted.   James Hitchcock has written about a certain type of Pelagianism that may have infiltrated the pre-Vatican II congregations.   Ordinary people whether Protestant, Catholic or "none" were finding it easy to do the right thing.  The post WWII culture supported it.   They were in danger of thinking that a good life could be lived easily.    Speaking in 1958, Joseph Ratzinger had already noted a "new paganism" affecting the European continent. ...subtler but as pervasive as communist diktat.  Some have noted that neo-Scholastic manualism had almost become a victim of its own success.



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