Whatever Happened To This Fr. Ratzinger?

Fr Ratzinger and Father Karl Rahner at Vatican II. My how times change.

The following is from a longer article in Commonweal written by John Wilkins entitled "Why I Became A Catholic". The entire article is worth reading, but the author's description of Vatican II and it's effect on so many people makes it especially worth while reading.

"What was happening in Rome was inseparable from his person. (John XXIII) From the start, despite the risks of the adventure he was taking, he radiated confidence and assurance. Humanly speaking, I doubt whether I could readily have discerned Peter the Fisherman in the figure of Pius XII. But in his successor it shone out. You could almost see him throwing out his nets to catch all people of goodwill.

Suddenly the Catholic Church was making news everywhere. Secular papers that previously might have had the same journalist to cover religion and sports now reported the council in depth. Thrust and counterthrust on the floor of the council hall-the nave of St. Peter’s-made good copy. It was this very public debate that perturbed the future Pope John Paul II, then Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, when he attended the council with his colleagues in the episcopate. In Poland they did things differently, discussing behind closed doors so that a front of unity was maintained against the Communist regime. (This particular aspect of JPII can not be stressed enough. In many respects his papacy reflected this same 'us against the world' mentality, especially towards any left leaning thinking.)

I followed the media accounts with astonishment. This church was not as I had imagined. It was a church of personalities. It was not like General Motors, a multinational organized from headquarters according to a blueprint for all the branches. The pope and the bishops were not above and outside the rest, as if on the top of a pyramid, but rather at the center of the circle constituted by the whole body. This was a communion of the servants of God, and the pope was the servant of the servants. Looking at Pope John, you saw that in action. (I just love this description, the hierarchy as the center of a circle constituted by the whole body.)

I was struck by the boldness of the proceedings in Rome. Here was a church, I saw, that felt itself to be intimately connected with the Upper Room where the first Christians received their calling, as if by an umbilical cord. It was as though it owned the tradition and safeguarded it, as well as being subject to it. So it felt able to develop that tradition and correct past interpretations of it and deductions from it, with a freedom that I found astonishing. It looked to me like a Reformation, Roman style. “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us,” was the apostles’ formula at the first council in the church’s history, held in Jerusalem about AD 49, according to the biblical account in Acts 15:28. The Catholic Church could still say that two thousand years later. It did, and change snowballed. (In other words tradition itself empowered the bishops to expand on it. It did not reduce them to defending it.)

Of course the church did not become something different. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. But the river flowing from the source in the Upper Room toward the sea of the Omega Point took a series of turns. Some of them were U-turns.

This church now announced that it understood itself to be traveling with all men and women of goodwill. It was reaching out to people like me. It no longer defined itself as a lighted castle on a hill, set above the murky flux of history, from which Christian knights would sally out to save whomever they could from secular evils and errors. It was a pilgrim with us on the road, ready to learn as well as teach. It had turned its back, said Pope John in his opening speech, on “those prophets of doom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.” After a period when it had seemed afraid of the modern world, it had regained its confidence, secure in the faith, as Pope John put it, that “Christ is ever resplendent as the center of history and of life.”

(This last sentence is what saddens me the most. The Church seems to have been reformed back into an institution afraid of the modern world, no longer believing that "Christ is ever resplendent as the center of history and of life", and dire predictions about the end of the world are back with us.)

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The impetus for John Wilkin's reflection was Benedict's pastoral gesture to SSPX. At the end of his reflection, John asks some very pertinent questions:

The pope has asserted that the Lefebvrist bishops, who remain suspended from celebrating the sacraments licitly, must now show true acceptance of Vatican II. But how could they ever do that? The only practical possibility would be an ambiguous formula that would allow them to sign while continuing in the same belief and practice as before. It would not matter so much if this brought these bishops back within the embrace of the church universal. It would matter a great deal if it brought the church universal closer to them.

Were those like me deceived when we saw a vision of what the church truly was at Vatican II and followed it? Was the council a flash in the pan, a hiccup in the church’s life, as it were, before the Catholic organism, challenged, closed back in on itself? I could never believe that. The currents of renewal have affected the river of Catholic belief too deeply and strongly to be denied. But what has happened to the wholehearted affirmation of the council that Joseph Ratzinger memorably expressed in his brilliant little book Theological Highlights of Vatican II, published in 1966 just after the bishops had finished their work?

Benedict's brilliant little book was a positive analysis of Vatican II, especially it's notions of ecumenism and the nature of the Church. It was not well received by traditionalists, especially Marcel Lefebvre's group. Their contention was that the Church's entire tradition had always stated their was no salvation outside of Catholicism. There were no legitimate ecclesial churches outside of Catholicism, and Catholicism held the total truth about Jesus Christ and his intentions for mankind. This link will take you to an analysis of Benedict's book from the SSPX perspective. The basic thrust of the analysis is that Vatican II was not an extension of traditional thinking on the true nature of the church, but was in direct opposition to tradition, making it a form of heresy.

Like John Wilkins, I see no way for the SSPX to affirm the teachings of Vatican II. Their opposition is the reason for their existence. Vatican II documents do leave open plenty of room for salvation outside of the Church. For Traditionalists there is no such thing as ecumenism, there is only conversion. There is no such thing as Truth outside of the Church, there is only heresy. These are not positions from which one dialogues, they are positions from which one bullies. This is why I think Wilkin's second option is far more likely, that Benedict's open hand signals a shift towards the thinking of SSPX and away from Vatican II.

If this turns out to be true, then Benedict has done exactly the same thing as Archbishop Chaput, gone from a humanist progressive to an authoritarian traditional conservative, and not just liturgically but in his conception of what the Church actually is.

Why, I wonder? Does all of this actually reflect an enormous lack of trust in the People of God, in the power of the Holy Spirit, in the ability of Jesus to work His love within the greater world? I think it does, because one of the hallmarks of a lack of trust is the need to assert authority to maintain a semblance of control. In other words, it isn't about faith in Jesus, it's about a lack of faith in the living Jesus, in the Resurrected Jesus. It forces the Church to operate from a position of existential powerlessness which is then manifested by having to force itself on the flock and the culture in which it is situated. Can anyone say 'Martino'.

The good news is in the end Jesus reserved our final judgement to His hands. Thank God.