To think with the Church.... In "the Spirit of Benny 16". Catholic Theology, Ecumenism, Interfaith relations, History, Liturgy, Philosophy and whatever topics are hot in the ecclesiastical world! Please comment - with gentleness and reverence! Our motto on this blog is: "Maior autem his est spes"
If you have been waiting for all the propositions from the Synod of Bishops on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church in English, you can stop holding your breath, because here they are thanks to the girls and boys at National Catholic Reporter and especially the one bright boy of the pack, John L. Allen Jnr.
posted by Schütz @ 5:06 pm
11 Comments
Name: Schütz
Home: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Peccator Inter Peccatores et Insanus Inter Insanos
See my complete profile
All opinions on this page of those of the author, and are in no way to be taken as the opinions of the Archdiocese of Melbourne or its agencies.
"In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas".
.JPG)
"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head." -- Terry Pratchet, Hogfather, page 242
Document Converter - a useful tool
11 Comments:
They've got to be kidding. Oh, that's right, they're not.
Looks like the ongoing definition of the new religion continues apace. A nod or two here and there to "Tradition", but the only tradition cited is the one begun in the 1960s, nothing prior to the Documents of Vatican II.
Why should there be, I guess. Lots of newspeak -- the assembly, the People of God, presiders at the Eucharist -- though, even toning down one of the two references to anything pre Vatican II (Prop 14, St Irenaeus). The other, Pius XII (Prop 25), is immediately taken into Dei verbum. Looks like they're ready to hack apart the Eastern lectionaries like they did the Western one ({Prop 16). I'm sure that will make the real Eastern churches so happy.
If there ever was anything to Roman Catholicism, this is just re-inventing the wheel. Except, it's a different wheel. Well, there's certainly precedent for that. If you don't like what's on the tablets God gave, make up your own stuff. Can't get more Biblical than that!
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, my dear Past Elder.
Pius XII is the father of Vatican II. He is the source quoted more often than any other non-scriptural source in the Vatican II documents. Many of his encyclicals formed the basis for the Vatican II declarations. Sorry to burst your bubble on that one. See This report by Fr Rosica here.
Secondly at the very beginning (#6) the Propositions call for a "Patristic Reading of Scripture".
Thirdly, the Propositions should not be confused with the Synodal Exhortation. They are not a teaching document of the Magisterium. They are simply issues which the Synod Fathers would like the Holy Father to address in his final Exhortation. That will be the place where one should look for citations of "the Tradition".
To link Mediator Dei with the rehashed phenomenology of Vatican II, or Divino Afflante Spiritu -- which is probably what put my first Bible into my hands -- with the sort of stuff let loose in Catholic scriptural theology with VII, or Fidei Donum with a call after all this time to actually proclaim the Gospel, let alone the idea that that is what the RCC is doing now with VII, is utterly laughable. Except to someone who must maintain "Vatican II" at all costs, even of reality itself.
Which it is clear is what the "Synod" must do, and the basis of the new religion will continue to be the Documents of Vatican II, the novus ordo, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all of them completely false to Roman Catholicism except since the 1960s.
To maintain Pius XII is the father of Vatican II is to miss entirely what either Pius XII or Vatican II were all about. Sorry, I was there for both. Really, such utter nonsense almost makes one consider sedevacanteism! Vatican II has shattered anything Pius XII might have accomplished.
But at least your typically postconciliar telling someone who isn't on board they say something they in fact do not is consistent. That the Synod's propositions pay lip service to a Tradition they do not cite whereas they repeatedly cite Vatican II and later documents is simply to observe the fact, not mistake it for a magisterial document.
But thanks for yet another, as if more were needed, confirmation of why I am not Roman Catholic any more, or rather, why Roman Catholic no longer exists to be any more. If you had headed East, at least you would have found Orthodoxy.
You know, PE, Sedevacantism actually makes more sense than you position?
At least the SV's believe that there is such a thing as the Catholic Church of which there should be a pope. You don't believe either.
You go on and on about how the current Church of Rome is not the Roman Catholic Church but something masquerading as the RCC - but you don't BELIEVE that the RCC was EVER the Church of Jesus Christ anyway! - So what difference does it make?
Or, to put it another way, tell me this:
What would your attitude have been if, the Second Vatican Council had decided that the Roman Catholic Church would throw out all its "false doctrines" and "traditions of men" and (four and a half centuries late) adopt the full agenda of the Reformation with the Book of Concord as its fundamental confessional statement?
Would you then today still be complaining today that this "post-reformation" RCC was "a new religion", a false-Catholic Church masquerading as the old (pre-reformation) Church?
In other words, are you saying that the Roman Catholic Church COULD never have and SHOULD never have been open to ANY change or reform - even to the TRUTH and the GOSPEL - but should always have continued like a statue cast in bronze, the same today tomorrow and always? Is that, in your mind, the only way it could have maintained its authenticity?
Oh, I forgot. You now deny that it ever DID have any authenticity.
There's no pleasing some people...
To get back to the point:
1. I think the proposition about women as instituted lectors is bound to be rejected, for reasons too obvious to go into.
What is sad is that the lay ministries of acolyte and especially lector are hardly used at all: occasionally I recall that I'm an instituted lector, but, as I only ever read at the Novus Ordo dressed as a layman, I don't think I ever read qua instituted lector, as opposed to qua Mr or Ms Smith; indeed, the only time I've ever exercised the ministry, properly vested, has been at Tenebræ and the Vigil of Easter in the old rite, when I sang a Lesson or two.
2. What is very interesting is the critique of the current Lectionary, and the suggestion to essentially adopt the Revised Common Lectionary. If more Scripture is what you want, I suppose this would be good.
3. I have no information as to what the reference to Oriental Catholic lectionaries entails: after all, other documents of the Holy See make it clear that no changes (Latinizations) in Eastern Rites are to be permitted that would lead away from their dissident counterparts, lest these changes cause scandal and impede the cause of reunion with Rome. In any case, the Byzantine lectionary is admirable, as it gets through essentially all the New Testament every year (the Old being used at Vespers). I suppose adding a third reading (as was still done in St Chrysostom's time) would be fine in theory, but in practice the scandal this innocent addition would cause would militate against it. I suspect that this comment relates to some of the lesser, the strictly so-called Oriental rites, whose lectionaries suffered abbreviation as a result of Latinization (typically by dropping the Old Testament readings), so perhaps what is proposed is to restore their authentic tradition. That seems most likely.
Just to clarify - my remarks above concern Propositions 17 and 16 respectively.
******
David, PE, et al. - of the propositions, which would be compatible with a Lutheran viewpoint, and which would not? Just curious.
(I suppose the indulgence for Bible reading in 9 would be... resented; also, the mention of consecrated life in 24, though is there not some such Lutheran group under Mother Basilea Schlink in Germany? And 55 on Our Lady would not be accepted in toto I suppose.)
******
Use of worthy liturgical books is a good point in 14; I wonder about "a visible place of honour" for the Lectionary, is that at all traditional? Sounds a bit Neo-Catechumenal! (I know it's done in some churches I know in Melbourne, but it always seemed weird to me.)
Well David, since you asked the questions I will answer them, even if they ignore what I have been saying on this blog since Post One.
My position on the postconciliar RCC in re the real RCC derives from the faith I was taught by the RCC, which in turn could not be what I thought it was, the true faith and church of Jesus Christ, since it lost to such a monstrous perversion of it at Vatican II, and there being nothing else with any valid claim to being the true faith and church of Jesus Christ, Christianity itself must then have been false all along. Hence twenty years as a Righteous of the Nations.
So I would hardly have expected a council to up and adopt the B of C, because until 12 years ago it and other Protestant confessional documents were in my mind just the sort of mish mash you get when to try to be church apart from church.
I came to deny any validity ever to the RCC not because of Lutheranism, but because since the RCC had morphed into something else, not only was that something else false, the RCC must have been false too or the gates of hell would not have prevailed against it in the fart from hell known as Vatican II. Lutheranism had no part in that, which at the time I saw as nothing more than half-assed Catholicism anyway.
Re change, to think the church has never or should never change is beyond addressing. Obviously it has and should. The post Trent church I knew was not established exactly that way by Christ, the Apostles, the Fathers, or anything else but Trent. The Tridentine Church was itself the product of "changes in the church". The question is not at all change per se, the question is what change, change into what -- in this case, the changes seen in the core documents of the new religion, the Documents of Vatican II, the novus ordo, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, utterly false to Roman Catholicism, monstrous perversions of it, not because they represent change, but because of the specific changes they represent.
Get it?
Lutheranism came twenty years later, and has mellowed my views on the RCC, pre and post council, considerably, not to mention shown me how Christian belief is possible at all in view of RCC history. If you understood me at all, the question you in fact would ask is this: suppose the RCC were to decide it made a huge mistake and reverse Vatican II completely, would I then go back?
The answer, until I became Lutheran, was yes. Now the answer is no. I now know what "catholic church" actually is, and neither the pre nor the post council RCC is it, or that in which its fulness subsides, but the catholic church can be found within either.
So in nuce, I'm not saying here you ought to drop this crap and resume your call to the Office of Holy Ministry (though as a Lutheran I say you should), I am saying here that, unlike our converts to Orthodoxy who get Orthodoxy when they convert, what a convert to Roman Catholicism gets when they convert, speaking as one who once believed that religion, is nothing but a barge of bilge lying peddled under the same name and while I would now question your decision, nonetheless if Roman Catholicism is what you want then run from this pile of dung precisely because what you want is Roman Catholicism.
God bless me in the car park.
Get it? Yes, I think I do, but it is still illogical. What, after all, is "Roman Catholicism"? Who or what defines it? Does how the Catholic Faith was taught to you in the 1950's equate with what the Roman Catholic Church truly is or was meant to be in toto? Could it not be that there was a lack of fullness in the way you learnt it? It is obviously true to say that Vatican II effected a change on the Church (which should not be confused with the changes wrought by revolutions in the name of the Council), the question is: was that change a change AWAY from what the Church is and should be or was it a change TOWARD what it should be? Or a mixture of both.
That last point is something that I think you fail to consider too. You call Vatican II "nothing but a barge of bilge", and yet to dismiss all the council documents with all their contents under this heading is patently to dismiss the Gospel itself, which is contained therein (whether as plainly as you would like it or not). Was there NOTHING good in your estimation of the Vatican Council?
Josh, thanks for your reflections on the topic. I think you are right re the Women lectors and the Eastern lectionary. We haven't properly understood what they were talking about.
I think a reform of the Common Lectionary is way overdue. What influences there will be in this reform is not clear - yes, it could be the Revised Common Lectionary (which generally is an improvement but which has its own faults, especially in the lectio continuo option in the Old Testament), or even the Eastern lectionary (!).
More likely Rome will do this (if she does this) without any reference at all to the ecumenical situation - like the English translation of the Missal. In fact it is likely to be just like the new English Translation. Just when we have all the world copying us and using ICEL translations, we will go and change what we do.
REgarding a Lutheran reading of the propositions - I would rather wait for the Exhortation to come out for this exercise. But I will say this: there has been a notable lack of use of the "Law/Gospel" paradigm - not that I would reasonably have expected any bishop to use such a paradigm anyway. It is a way of reading Scripture that is at one and the same time completely at the heart of Lutheranism and completely foreign to the Catholic tradition (both Eastern and Western).
Yes, I must admit I scarce even grasp dimly what this Law/Gospel paradigm means: Lutherans seem devoted to it, but to me, a reasonably well-instructed Catholic, it is simply unknown.
Could you be so kind as to explain it?
It will need a separate blog. I will get to it when I am hard up for something else to do!
But in a nutshell, anything reading of the scripture or theology or preaching which makes demands upon me (what I should/ought to/must do etc) is "Law" and anything that speaks of grace, or giftedness, or what God has done for me is "Gospel".
Of coure, both hermeneutics are often applicable to the same scriptural text, so it is all in the twist that the preacher puts upon it.
Of course, in this paradigm, preaching sanctification as anything other than the free gift of God (ie. any suggestion that I must in someway cooperate with the process of sanctification, or put some effort into it) is "Law" (= bad).
There is a great deal of argument about what is called the "Third use of the Law", but that should wait till the bigger blog.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home