The Church was also a mess before Vatican II

Unfairly blamed ?

Though it's in a much worse mess now.   So says Francis Phillips.  Comments are worth a look, too.

Petulant Hans Kung to skip Vatican II celebration

 Hans Kung - prefers to mourn

Kung waited until the last second to notify his hosts he wouldn't be coming, which is not the behavior of a gentleman.  Well, as Colonel Harrington observed in The Lady Eve,  "a mug is a mug in everything."

If a man such as Kung considers the fiftieth anniversary of the Council an occasion better suited to mourning than celebration, perhaps the Church has come through the post-Council crisis in better shape than some of us fear.

Abbot Vonier on "Participation" in the Eucharistic Sacrifice

In the "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy" (#14), the Vatican Council II fathers famously declared "that all the faithful should be led to that full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy, and to which the Christian people, 'a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people' (1 Pt. 2:9, 4-5) have a right and obligation by reason of their baptism."   Debate over the meaning of "active participation" has been going on ever since.  To many, active participation requires moving about, clapping, or, at the very least, holding hands.  Others take participation in a very different sense.  Although he was writing many decades before the Council, Abbot Vonier addressed participation in the Eucharist by the faithful in his masterful text "A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist:"

"If the sacramental character of the priest enables him to be the sacrificant in Christ's Person, sacramental character also enables the multitude of the faithful to join in that sacrifice in their own way.  The sacramental character of Baptism first, and then the sacramental character of Confirmation, are with the sacramental character of Order, though in a lesser degree, figures and resemblances of Christ's Priesthood; and therefore every baptized person is radically fit to communicate in that great sacrifice, to be a sacrificant - at least by participation.

"The sacramental character is a certain participation of the priesthood of Christ in His faithful, in the sense that as Christ has the full power of spiritual priesthood, His faithful also are made like Him in this, that they share in a certain spiritual power with regard to the sacraments and to those things which belong to the divine cult." (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, q, 63, a. 5)

Pope John XXIII, Traditionalist

Pope John XXIII

The fiftieth anniversary of the second Vatican Council is fast approaching, and as one scans the waste and wreckage that previously was the Catholic Church in the US and in Europe, the conclusion that the Council was the cause, and the wreckage is the effect is difficult to resist.  Certainly, in calling the Council, Pope John XXIII had much more modest and traditional purposes in mind, as his drafts of Council documents show, than the Council itself expressed in its own extremely lengthy, complex and controversial documents.  Though he will always be associated with the highly innovative Council, John XXIII was a highly traditional man.  This is obvious from a consideration of Pope John's meditations on the Rosary, which Rorate Caeli makes available here.

The Second Vatican Council was pastoral

Not dogmatic, says Benedict, meaning one may dissent from its controversial points and remain in communion with the Church.  Repercussions are sure to be numerous.

"The Virgin Mary is exalted high above the choirs of angels."

                              "The Assumption of the Virgin" by El Greco 

 

"Let all the faithful rejoice and bless the Lord."

The above antiphon is from the office of Lauds for today's great feast, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Nothing is known for certain of the time or place or circumstances of the Virgin's death.  However, the tradition that Mary's body did not decay but that she was raised up, body and soul, into heaven is quite ancient.  By the 6th century, we find in St. Gregory of Tours the first written reference in the West to the Blessed Virgin's Assumption.  This belief, and the feast celebrating this belief, spread, at first mainly in France, but gradually throughout the Church.  Finally, in 1950 Pope Pius XII in the Bull Munificentissimus Deus, declared infallibly that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a dogma of the Catholic Faith. This teaching was likewise declared by the Second Vatican Council in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, which states that "the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things."

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

UPDATE: The Feast of the Assumption is not a holy day of obligation in the US this year.

Vatican II - rupture is not the same as reform

At Ars Orandi, David Werling responds to Enrico Morini's argument that Vatican II was both a continuity with tradition, and a rupture from tradition.  In sum, Werling argues that Morini is playing with definitions.

Vatican II - Continuity and Rupture

Courtesy of Sandro Magister, we bring you the latest entry in the debate between traditionalists and innovators concerning the hermeneutic of the Second Vatican Council. 

Historian Enrico Morini argues that the Council should not be regarded as in continuity with tradition.  Nor was it a rupture from tradition.  Instead, it was both.