More on Vatican II’s doomed attempt to co-opt modernity

Before posting the discussion on Vatican II, I had asked our participant Matt, who is Catholic, what he thought of it, and his answer adds to our understanding of the “squishy ambiguity” of the Vatican II documents referred to by “A” in that earlier entry:

Larry,

I don’t know that I have much to add to your summary. Whatever else may be said about the Reformation, when we sawed Christendom down the middle we broke something so badly that it is difficult to envision it ever righting itself. Perhaps it is the ultimate test of faith to live in such times. And I think there is merit in it when you say that they went in the opposite direction from what was needed.

I tend to think of the whole “Catholic phenomenalism” thing as an attempt to corrupt modern language with traditional Catholic concepts; an ill-conceived attempt to beat them by joining them that actually accomplishes the reverse. The modern age is on the whole a story of corruption from within (that is, where open conflict is avoided as much as possible and the real wars take place behind closed doors, couched in diplomatic language); and Vatican II is the Church’s apparently vain attempt to corrupt modernism from within rather than calling it to repentance from without. Vatican II was perhaps intended at least by some as a call for a phenomenological crusade against modernism using weapons of charity: get to the lost where they sleep, eat, live, breathe, and politic every day, to cross the cultural sea rather than the geographic one.

But at the end of the day it is one thing to eat with the prostitutes and another thing entirely to sleep with them.

Pope Paul VI explicitly stated, in the Council documents, that the Council was pastoral and does not carry the weight of dogma except where it says so clearly and explicitly. And as far as I can tell it never says much of anything clearly and explicitly.

I’ve tried on a number of occasions to read the “balanced” accounts of Vatican II (e.g. The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber) and I find it breaks my ability to concentrate in short order, every time. The actual documents of Vatican II are like that too. On one side of the 1960’s you have bracing clear-headed encyclicals confronting modernism, condemning error, and presenting positive dogma; and on the other side the words are so tortured and deliberately ambiguous as to make any attempt to read them maddening. For example, the always-and-everywhere teaching against forced conversion is re-articulated as a “right to religious freedom” in an attempt to coopt what liberals mean by “religious freedom”; and what everyone hears is that “ex ecclesium nullus salus” has been revoked, modernism has won.

The attempt to suspend judgment on the edge of a cliff of ambiguity can’t last forever though. It is an intrinsically unstable state, this state of perpetual ecumenical dialogue, of perpetually making nice rather than allowing the divisive truth to be spoken unambiguously. Where it will all lead is anyone’s guess, but we can be assured that it will not stay suspended as it is. These are not good days to be a status-quo conservative.

Matt

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 21, 2004 07:51 PM | Send