A doctrinal time bomb was brought into the Church at Boston

Fr.Angelo Geiger wrote during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI :

 

As the pope continuously promotes the Second Vatican Council and its correct interpretation, the new self-appointed “guardians” of Tradition persist in their attempt to tear the Council down. Of particular interest is the sequence of events, a timeline of conflict between faith and doubt, surrounding the announcement of the Year of Faith by Pope Benedict and the particular involvement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Over the last year or so there has been an ongoing debate among theologians, journalists and bloggers about the possibility of the hermeneutic of continuity, that is, there is a question in the minds of some whether Pope Benedict is correct and the Council can be interpreted in continuity with Catholic Tradition. But before we look at a timeline, we should first examine a bit of background.

Lionel:

The cause of a hermeneutic of continuity or rupture depends on the use of an irrational premise in the interpretation of Vatican Council II. The premise is that the dead now saved in Heaven can be seen on earth. So there are exceptions to traditional documents, especially extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

 

The hermeneutic of rupture is a principle of interpretation relative to the Council that is shared by both modernists and traditionalists.

 

Lionel: What is the basis of the interpretation ? What is the principle ? What is it precisely? This is never pointed out.

 

 In the December 22, 2005 address the Holy Father explains that the hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture posits the existence and disjunction of a pre- and post-conciliar Church.

 

Lionel: We know there is a general hermenutic of discontinuity.What is not explained is the precise cause of the discontinuity or continuity.

 

 This view regards the Second Vatican Council as a compromise between Tradition and modernity, in which the texts of the Council themselves broke with the past, but did not fully and explicitly indicate how radical and complete that break actually was.

Lionel: Here we see that the cause of the discontinuity or continuity is unknown.

How can the texts of the Council break with the past and also not break with the past at the same time?

They break with the past when the false premise is used.This is the cause of the discontinuity.

Without the false premise there is no ambiguity in Vatican Council II.

 

  According to this narrative, the pope tells us, the texts themselves were compromises born of the necessity to reach some sort of unanimity among the council fathers. “However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts (December 22, 2005). This is the origin of that enthusiastic and amorphous infatuation with the “spirit of the Council.” The remarkable thing is that both modernists and traditionalists hold this interpretative principle. They both believe that the Council is a rupture with Tradition, the modernists because the Council did not explicitly go far enough, and the traditionalists because it went too far.

Lionel: It is clear that the cause of the discontinuity is not known.

Attendant upon this “compromise” interpretation of the Council is the notion that the nature of the Council was political, “a sort of constituent that eliminates an old constitution and creates a new one” (ibid.).

Lionel: More speculation. Since the precise cause is overlooked.

Both modernists and traditionalists believe that the Council democratized the Church.

 

Lionel: It democratized the Church if you are using the false premise in the interpretation.The Council becomes non-traditional.

 

  Modernists have spent the last fifty years tearing down or ignoring all disciplinary structures and misusing the conciliar ideals of the dignity of the human person, religious liberty, collegiality and subsidiarity as a pretext for reinventing everything from sexual morality, to liturgy, to God Himself (or herself, they would say).

Lionel: Yes, after using the false premise in the interpretation.

  Unfortunately, traditionalists agree that the innovation of the Council was not an aspect of its continuity with Tradition but a surrender to the political, progressivist forces of the left. For both modernists and traditionalists it is the revolution of modernity that defines the real meaning of the Council.

Lionel: Traditionalists, the SSPX included, were unaware of the false premise being used.

But the Holy Father counters that the Council was not and could not be a constitutional convention:

However, the Constituent Assembly needs a mandator and then confirmation by the mandator, in other words, the people the constitution must serve. The Fathers had no such mandate and no one had ever given them one; nor could anyone have given them one because the essential constitution of the Church comes from the Lord and was given to us so that we might attain eternal life and, starting from this perspective, be able to illuminate life in time and time itself (ibid.)...

 

Lionel: The Council Fathers did not violate their mandate.They gave us a traditional Vatican Council.The false premise came into the Church in the 1940's in Boston. The Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Richard Cushing and the Jesuits were active at Vatican Council II.At Boston they placed a doctrinal Time Bomb in the Catholic Church.

Time Bomb

Father Angelo Geiger F.I:

And now to my timeline leading to the Year of Faith: it illustrates the progression of certain ideas now gaining currency in orthodox circles and how the Holy Father is responding to them.

1.December 22, 2005: Pope Benedict, shortly after his election as Successor of St. Peter, delivers his address to the Roman Curia, outlining the postconciliar crisis and the correct interpretative principles of the Second Vatican Council. The Holy Father strongly reaffirms the wisdom of the Council and its direction, upholding the need for “the dialogue between reason and faith,” “on the basis of the Second Vatican Council.” (Lionel :this is vague.The precise cause is still not mentioned) He goes on to say: “This dialogue must now be developed with great openmindedness but also with that clear discernment that the world rightly expects of us in this very moment. Thus, today we can look with gratitude at the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church” (December 22, 2005). (Lionel :the right hermeneutic depends on avoiding the irrational premise)

 2.July 7, 2007: the promulgation of the apostolic letter of Benedict XVI, issued motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum (taking force September 14, 2007) “on the use of the Roman Liturgy prior to the reform of 1970,” mandating the free use of the old missal as the “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite. The Holy Father expresses his purpose in terms of responding “to the insistent prayers” of those who “adhered and continue to adhere with great love and affection to the earlier liturgical forms.” In the letter accompanying the motu proprio, the Holy Father also expresses his hope that the biformity of the Roman Rite “can be mutually enriching.”

3.January 21, 2009: Pope Benedict lifts the excommunication of the four SSPX bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. In a letter to all the bishops of March 10, 2009, he clarifies that the lifting of the excommunication and its remission “affects individuals, not institutions”: “The remission of the excommunication was a measure taken in the field of ecclesiastical discipline: the individuals were freed from the burden of conscience constituted by the most serious of ecclesiastical penalties. This disciplinary level needs to be distinguished from the doctrinal level. The fact that the Society of Saint Pius X does not possess a canonical status in the Church is not, in the end, based on disciplinary but on doctrinal reasons.”

1. March, 2009: Eminent Italian theologian, Monsignor Brunero Gherardini has his book, Il Concilio Vaticano II: Un discorso da fare (The Ecumenical Vatican Council II: A Much Needed Discussion), published by the Franciscan of the Immaculate, together with an open letter to the Holy Father in which he questions the possibility of a hermeneutic of continuity, placing the burden of proof on Pope Benedict to demonstrate rather than declaim the continuity of the Council with Tradition. (He asked for specific proof. The exact cause was still not identified) Monsignor Gherardini calls for “a grand and possibly definitive ordering of the last Council in all of its dimensions and content,” to be conducted by “the most prestigious, secure and renowned specialists in every sector which Vatican II touches upon.” (He also does not know the precise cause of the discontinuity) Gherardini effectively subordinates the magisterium of the pope to a committee of “scientific theologians.”
2. December 16-18, 2010: The Franciscan of the Immaculate sponsor a Conference in Rome, Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II: Un Concilio Pastorale, Analisi Storico, Filosofico, Teologica (The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Pastoral Council – Historical, Philosophical and Theological Analysis). Among the conference speakers are Monsignor Brunero Gherardini, and Italian professor of history and editor of the Italian monthly Radici Cristiane, Roberto De Mattei. The latter is also the founder of The Lepanto Foundation, “a non-profit institution founded in Washington, D.C., in March 2001,” whose “stated mission is to defend the principles and institutions of Western Christian civilization.” De Mattei is also an admirer and biographer of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, founder of the Brazilian civic organization, The Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property. He and his Lepanto Foundation seem to operate on the same principles laid out by De Oliveira in the latter’s book Revolution and Counter-Revolution.(Still the precise cause of the discontinuity is not known to them)
3. April, 2011: The December, 2010 conferences by Gherardini and De Mattei set off a firestorm of controversy. The semi-official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano publishes articles by Inos Biffi and Agostino Marchetto that severely critiqued the conferences of Gherardini and De Mattei. In particular, De Mattei has successfully managed to turn Pope Benedict’s invitation to “dialogue” on the basis of the “right hermeneutic” as an invitation to “debate” the possibility of the very same hermeneutic. (See De Mattei’s article: “A Council Can Also Make Mistakes”). (The December 22, 2005 conference is used over and over by the partisans of doubt as a pretext for debating the very possibility of a hermeneutic of continuity: a very effective bit of sleight of hand.) (All sides mean well but they do not know there is a precise cause of the discontinuity)
4. May 1, 2011: Pope Benedict beatifies his predecessor, Pope John Paul In his homily Pope Benedict quotes the newly beatified: “‘I would like once again to express my gratitude to the Holy Spirit for the great gift of the Second Vatican Council, to which, together with the whole Church – and especially with the whole episcopate – I feel indebted. I am convinced that it will long be granted to the new generations to draw from the treasures that this Council of the twentieth century has lavished upon us. As a Bishop who took part in the Council from the first to the last day, I desire to entrust this great patrimony to all who are and will be called in the future to put it into practice. For my part, I thank the Eternal Shepherd, who has enabled me to serve this very great cause in the course of all the years of my Pontificate’. And what is this ‘cause’? It is the same one that John Paul II presented during his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square in the unforgettable words: ‘Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ!’” The Society of St. Pius X responded responded by stating the following: “Whereas St. Pius X wanted to restore all things in Jesus Christ (according to the original in Greek: to recapitulate, to place Christ at the head), John Paul II only wanted to open things up to Christ, by simply proposing Him to society, to culture, to political and economical systems, – and that in the name of a religious liberty paradoxically conceived as a dogma by an officially pastoral council.” The SSPX author concludes by calling the Council’s teaching on religious liberty “a rupture.” (Dignitatis Hunmanae refers to the rights of non Catholics in a state with a secular Constituion. It is a factual observation. It is not a rupture with the past. Catholics can proclaim the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus. DH does not state that they do not have this Religious Liberty).
5. September 14, 2011: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith presents Bishop Fellay of the SSPX with a “doctrinal preamble” for his signature, on the condition of which the SSPX would be restored to full unity and canonical status. According to the CDF, the “doctrinal preamble” “enunciates some of the doctrinal principles and criteria of interpretation of Catholic doctrine necessary for ensuring fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church and to the sentire cum Ecclesia, while leaving open to legitimate discussion the study and theological explanation of particular expressions and formulations present in the texts of the Second Vatican Council and of the Magisterium that followed it.” The document goes on to say: “Given the concerns and requests presented by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X regarding the integrity of the Catholic faith considering the hermeneutic of rupture of the Second Vatican Council in respect of Tradition—hermeneutic mentioned by Pope Benedict XVI in his Address to the Roman Curia of December 22, 2005—, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith takes as a fundamental basis for a full reconciliation with the Apostolic See the acceptance of the Doctrinal Preamble which was delivered in the course of the meeting of September 14, 2011” (ibid.) Bishop Fellay’s response was tentative, noting: “Today, for the sake of objectivity, I must acknowledge that in the doctrinal preamble there is no clear-cut distinction between the inviolable dogmatic sphere and the pastoral sphere that is subject to discussion.” (There was still confusion over dogma/doctrine. The dogma on exclusive salvation in the Catholic Church was rejected. How and why it was rejected  was not known to them).
6. September 24, 2011, ten days after the CDF delivers the “doctrinal preamble to Bishop Fellay, Monsignor Gherardini republishes his open letter to the Holy Father (translation) with eighty-three signatures from eminent scholars, including himself and Roberto De Mattei.(with the interpretation of Vatican Council II using the irrational premise)  The challenge to the Holy Father to prove the hermeneutic of continuity is renewed: “If it should happen that this continuity cannot be proved scientifically, as a whole or in part, it would be necessary to say so calmly and candidly, in response to the demand for clarity that has been awaited for almost a half a century.” ( 'this continuity cannot be proved scientifically' ! They wanted to know the precise cause of the discontinuity or continuity.They wanted a concrete answer)
7. October 11, 2011: Pope Benedict promulgates the apostolic letter, Porta Fidei, “the Door of Faith” in which he announces “A Year of Faith” to begin in exactly one year on October 11, 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Catechism of the Catholic Church. He makes the words of Blessed John Paul II his own: “I feel more than ever in duty bound to point to the Council as the great grace bestowed on the Church in the twentieth century,” and restates his December 22, 2005 contention concerning the Council: “if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.” (Amen! I would agree with him!!! Without the false premise the Council 'will be the ever necessary renewal of the Church'.)
8. October 27, 2011: The Holy Father conducts a day of reflection, dialogue and prayer for peace and justice in the world in Assisi on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Blessed John Paul’s encounter with the representatives of the world’s religions. He does this in spite of the Society of St. Pius X’s contention that he would be “renewing the Assisi scandal,” saying that “to err is human, to persevere in error is diabolical.” The Holy Father uses the opportunity of his address to descry two types of violence that have plagued the modern world: religious violence and godless violence. The Church continues to defend religious liberty and the need to maintain freedom from coercion in spite of the scandal taken by traditionalists.
9. November 30, 2011: Bishop Fellay of the SSPX revealed that he was offering a counter-proposal to the Vatican in regard to the preamble, which he made clear he could not sign as it was. He drew a sharp distinction between the Creed and the doctrinal preamble saying that the Council, which was pastoral, did not add any new articles of the faith, such as: “I believe in religious freedom, in ecumenism, in collegiality.” While he did not reveal what his proposal was, he suggested that the Vatican’s response would enable the society to evaluate their “remaining options.” However, “the heads of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, the Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William Levada and Mgr. Guido Pozzo, are of the opinion that no substantial changes can be made to the document.(Cardinal Levada and Archbishop Pozzo have at public forums used the hermeneutic of discontinuity. They used the false premise. At the SSPX-Vatican doctrinal talks too both sides used the false premise in the interpretation of Vatican Council II and were unaware of it )
10. January 6, 2012: The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith promulgates its “Note with pastoral recommendations for the Year of Faith.” There it reiterates Pope Benedict’s homogeneous teaching on the Council: “From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI has worked decisively for a correct understanding of the Council, rejecting as erroneous the so-called ‘hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’ and promoting what he himself has termed ‘the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.’” It goes on to maintain that The Catechism of the Catholic Church “in this same vein, is both an ‘authentic fruit of Vatican Council II’ and a tool for aiding in its reception.( Still the exact cause of the confusion has not been identified.)
11. January 2012: Bishop Fellay, representing the Society of St. Pius X, sends a letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, informing the Holy the reason why the the “doctrinal preamble” remains unsigned and suggesting modifications to the document.(He was using the false premise in the interpretation of Vatican Council II so the Council was a doctrinal break with the past for Bishop Bernard Fellay).

12 March 16, 2012: The CDF issues a communiqué concerning the official response of the SSPX to the “doctrinal preamble,” informing the Society that their position “is not sufficient to overcome the doctrinal problems which lie at the foundation of the rift between the Holy See and the Society of St. Pius X,” and warning them of the “painful and incalculable consequences” of an “ecclesial rupture.” Bishop Fellay has been asked to “ clarify his position in order to be able to heal the existing rift, as is the desire of Pope Benedict XVI.” According to reports the Society has been given one month to respond. ( They did not know the exact cause for the hermenutic of discontinuity or continuity was a simple irrational statement used to interpret Vatican Council II)

 

 

http://maryvictrix.com/2012/03/23/a-year-of-faith-or-a-year-of-doubt/