Note. Before he died he told us these words that we put as the title of a series of articles on the third war that was rather in defense of the faith, which, in turn, was the most devastating whose consequences are being experienced with greater intensity nowadays.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was not only a spectator, but also had a very active participation in said Council, forming part of the conservative or orthodox wing alongside the great Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacchi. Here is how he himself relates his experiences in this Council: (Citatios will be omitted in the article for being long)
Facing the Conciliar Storm (1962-1965)
1. Member of the Central Preparatory Commission
"By inspiration of the Most High..."
What do Your Most Reverend Eminences think of the possibility of convening an ecumenical council to continue the Vatican council interrupted in 1870?
Those were the words of Pius XI in the secret consistory of May 23, 1923. Almost unanimously, the Cardinals were against the undertaking: the advantages that a Council could offer could be achieved, they said, without a Council, and were not worth the effort. Its drawbacks are almost certain. In turn, Cardinal Billot stood up:
It is not possible to hide, he said, the existence of deep divergences within the episcopate itself... which runs the risk of provoking discussions that could last indefinitely. Shouldn't we rather fear - he added later - that the Council would be "manipulated" by the worst enemies of the Church, the modernists, who are already preparing, as some indications show, to take advantage of the General Estates of the Church to make the revolution, a new 1789?
It is to be feared, he concluded, that "procedures of discussion and propaganda more in line with democratic uses than with the traditions of the Church" will be introduced .
Thirty-six years later, on January 25, 1959, Pope John XXIII announced 2 to the Cardinals gathered in the monastery of Saint Paul Outside the Walls his "humble decision" to hold an ecumenical Council 3 .
His image of the Council was ironic:
Admirable spectacle of the cohesion, unity and concord of the Holy Church of God, [...] will in itself be an invitation to the separated brothers [...] to return to the universal flock, whose direction and custody Christ wanted to entrust definitely to San Pedro 4 .
However, the announcement of January 25, 1959 had caused deep discomfort, especially among the institutional collaborators of the Pope 5 , with the exception of Cardinal Ottaviani.
Archbishop Lefebvre will judge Pope John's stubborn optimism harshly:
He wanted to ignore the fact that his predecessor, Pope Pius XII, who had also thought of calling a council, had the prudence to give up his project because of the enormous risks it represented for the Church. John XXIII literally insisted on it. He did not want to hear any of those who tried to dissuade him. Many discouraged him from convening a council. They warned him of the pressure that the media would exert. But no, he replied, that doesn't matter.
Even before the election of Juan as Supreme Pontiff, those initiated in Roncallian thought had no doubts about his intentions to "consecrate ecumenism"7; the former representative and later Apostolic Delegate in Bulgaria (1925-1934) had spoken out very early against the missionary action of Eastern Catholics (the so-called "Uniates") and in favor of an apostolate for "the union of the Churches in order to form all together the true and unique Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ»8. Cardinal Tardini's survey.
Archbishop Lefebvre was still unaware, as is natural, of the intricacies of a council already virtually full of traps, when he received a letter from Cardinal Tardini on June 18, 1959, in which he asked the world episcopate what topics should be dealt with at the Council. Since May 17, in fact, John XXIII had announced the constitution of a Pre-Preparatory Commission, chaired by Domenico Tardini, Secretary of State, and made up of ten members, among whom were the Very Reverend Father Arcadio Larraona, Claretian, His Excellencies Pietro Palazzini and Dino Staffa, and the Reverend Father Paul Philippe. 9
Some of the episcopal responses deserve to be known. The Bishop of a tiny Italian Diocese, Monsignor Carli, wishing above all that the inconveniences of such smallness be remedied, nevertheless expressed his doctrinal concern by wishing that the council condemn "materialistic evolutionism" and "moral relativism". He too was disturbed by the intrigues of international Jewry. His concerns were shared and surpassed by those of a Brazilian bishop, Antonio de Castro Mayer, who requested that the council "denounce the existence of a conspiracy against the City of God, and who thought that "the formation of the clergy should tend primarily to the creation of priests to combat the anti-Christian conspiracy».
The Archbishop of Dakar, who would soon conclude the holy alliance with these Prelates that we will describe later, contrasted with them due to his above all pastoral concerns: in his response to Cardinal Tardini 11 he advocated speeding up the process of annulment of marriage, simplifying the rules on ecclesiastical benefits and canonical penalties, the extension of the power to hear confessions and the expansion of the possibility of celebrating Mass in the afternoon. He considered a more generalized use of the clergyman,highlighted by a small cross with a pin; he advocated an increase in the number of Bishops, so that a diocese would not have more than two hundred thousand faithful; it suggested the adaptation of the ceremonies of baptism to the catechumenate; he strongly criticized the shortcomings of the Congregation for Propaganda Asks and proposed a quite radical reform plan 12 .
These proposals coincided with the pastoral audacity, the practicality and the essentially apostolic concern that we have already seen in the Archbishop of Dakar, favorable to modernity in the sense of a better adaptation of means and structures to missionary ends.
He was particularly concerned about good order in diocesan government. He defended the free exercise of the authority of the Bishops before the invading episcopal assemblies and the foreign directives of the Catholic Action. He demanded details about the apostolate of the laity.
However, he also expressed his concern for sound doctrine, proposing remedies against the doctrinal deviations that were spread in the seminaries, especially the teaching according to the Summa of Saint Thomas and the help of a compendium of the social doctrine of the Church. Two particular points of doctrine held his attention: the dogma "outside the Church there is no salvation", which had to be specified against some "serious errors 13 that put an end to the missionary sense of the Church", and a Marian truth that " it seemed appropriate to define or at least affirm»: «that the Most Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God, is mediatrix of all graces 14 . This truth would confirm the spiritual motherhood of the Blessed Virgin».
The proposals of Archbishop Lefebvre and the other three Bishops that we have cited contrasted with the “average” of global episcopal suggestions 15 , among which requests for doctrinal clarifications were very rare.
The Trojan horse in the City of God
On June 5, Monsignor Lefebvre, then Archbishop of Dakar, was appointed by John XXIII as a member of the Central Preparatory Commission for the Council, as was Bernard Yago, Archbishop of Abidjan, in his capacity as representative of French-speaking West Africa. Composed of 120 members, it should examine the plans drawn up by the ten preparatory commissions according to the proposals of the world episcopate.
Until June 1962 the Archbishop (who at that time had already become the Bishop of Tulle) participated in all the sessions of the Central Commission, sometimes presided over by the Supreme Pontiff; He was thus able to verify the seriousness of the preparation, but also the terrible struggle of influences that had been unleashed between the two poles that the Pope himself had created: that of the "Romans", with the Theological Commission of Cardinal Ottaviani, Pro-Secretary of the Holy Office, and that of the liberals and their “Trojan horse”, the Secretariat for Christian Unity, chaired by Cardinal Agostino Bea, with the assistance of the young Dutch Prelate Jan Willebrands (16).
First skirmishes
Like all the Fathers, Archbishop Lefebvre had received the list of experts appointed by the Pope for the various preparatory commissions (17), and he read it carefully. For this reason, in the first session of the Central Commission on June 15, 1961, when it was his turn to give his opinion, he did not hesitate to denounce (he was the only one to do so) the contradiction between the sayings and the facts:
As for the qualities of the theologians and canonists of the Council, it is clear, as the councilors have explicitly stated (18), that above all they must have a sense of the Church and adhere in heart, word and deed to the doctrine of the Supreme Pontiffs, exposed in all the documents that come from them. This principle must be affirmed today more than ever, because it has not ceased to surprise us, in my humble opinion, to read in the list of preparatory commissions the names of some theologians whose doctrine does not seem to meet the qualities required by counselors (19).
Indeed, at least three consultants had been censured or sanctioned by higher authority (20).
At that moment, Monsignor Lefebvre later recounted, Cardinal Ottaviani did not seem to take my words into account, but after the meeting, in the "café", he took me by the arm:
"I know," he said, "but what can I do? This is how the Holy Father wanted it: he wants renowned experts 21 .
And Monsignor Lefebvre later commented on that decision of Pope John:
In fact, he was rather prone to laxity. His head might be traditional enough, but his heart certainly wasn't. Under the guise of professing a certain open-mindedness, he had slipped too easily into a liberal spirit. And when they later commented on the difficulties of the Council, he assured his interlocutors that "everything would work out" and that "everyone would agree". He could not accept the idea that some had bad intentions and that one had to be vigilant. [...] he also imposed the experts condemned by the Holy Office, despite the reasonable concerns that his decision caused him 22 .
Starting in November 1961, they began, before the Central Commission, the examination and discussion of the schemes prepared by the commissions: the Archbishop, in general, gave them his placet, his "yes":
The Council —he would say later— was preparing, through the preparatory commissions, to proclaim the truth in the face of these [contemporary] errors in order to make them disappear for a long time from the bosom of the Church; [...] was preparing to be a luminous announcement in today's world, [and it would have been] if the pre-conciliar texts had been used in which there was a solemn profession of sure doctrine regarding modern problems 23 .
In fact, on January 20, 1962, when Cardinal Ottaviani exposed his schema "On the deposit of faith that must be kept in all its purity", Archbishop Lefebvre, who thought that the Church could not preserve that deposit without fighting the errors, stated:
The Council must deal with current errors... How can we defend the faith if we have no principles?24.
Later, on the 23rd, he proposed in his oral observation that the Council prepare two kinds of documents:
Along with the proposed schemes, which would be accompanied by "canons that precisely and almost scientifically 'reject'" the current errors, the Council would write a booklet that would expose "in a more positive way" the synthesis of the entire Christian economy, "where It would be luminously clear that there can be no salvation outside of Jesus our Savior and his Mystical Body which is the Church25, [...] according to the idea of numerous members of the Commission»26.
The insidious criticism of the liberal Fathers already worried Archbishop Lefebvre: on January 20 Cardinal Alfrink had reproached a scheme by Cardinal Ottaviani for being "linked to a philosophical school", and Cardinal Bea denounced the "scholastic language" of the document. Sensing that, as of that second preparatory session, the Liberals had begun a major maneuver to discard all the schemes that they did not like, that is, the majority, the Archbishop presented his bold and original proposal. The liberals were not fooled and understood that they would have in Marcel Lefebvre an adversary determined to thwart his machinations. Cardinal Ottaviani, on the other hand, approved and praised Archbishop Lefebvre's idea, and many Fathers followed suit. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned.
As the sessions took place, the same scene was repeated: after the presentation of each scheme by the president of the commission that had prepared it, the discussion began, almost always led by the eminent Liénart, Frings, Alfrink, Dópfner, Kónig and Léger, on the one hand, and Ruffini, Siri, Larraona and Browne, on the other: 6 Cardinals against 4.
It was obvious to all the members present, Archbishop Lefebvre explained, that there was a division within the Church, a division that was not fortuitous or superficial, but profound, even more so among the Cardinals than among the Archbishops or the Bishops.
Over time, Marcel Lefebvre's interventions became more frequent, already prepared in advance after reading the outlines received weeks before, already drafted during the sessions while listening to the liberal Fathers. Opportune, serious and with a supernatural spirit, the Archbishop rose to speak on behalf of the sensus Ecclesia.
Thus, on January 17, 1962, when Cardinal Aloisi Masella's scheme on the sacrament of Holy Orders proposed that deacons could marry, Archbishop Lefebvre protested:
In our mission regions, it seems to me that this new practice will be interpreted as an open door to the marriage of priests, quod non placet. In addition, there is the certain danger that priestly vocations will decrease. [...] Now, on the other hand, I very much like the new institution of a permanent diaconate order.
Defender of the Roman, Traditional, Latin and Gregorian Mass
The March-April 1962 session touched on the liturgy: Cardinal Larraona reluctantly presented Father Bugnini's schema, signed by his predecessor, the late Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani 27 . This was the detailed plan for a systematic reform (instauratio) of the entire liturgy according to the innovative principles that had already been applied by 27 Died February 5. He had signed on February 1st , after having expressed his rejection for a long time, the outline of the liturgical Commission that he presided over. His successor, Larraona, was very unhappy at having to ratify the Bugnini scheme.
Fathers Antonelli and Bugnini to the reform of the Holy Week rites, and hastening the 1960 reform of the Code of Rubrics, "under the prevailing pressure of new innovative ferments" 28 .
While the liberal Fathers enthusiastically praised this scheme, "which should be counted among the most outstanding schemes that had hitherto been proposed to our Central Commission," as Dopfner put it, Ottaviani denounced in it a "spirit that opened the doors too wide to novelties, or at least fed the itch for innovations».
For his part, Monsignor Lefebvre denounced the definition of the liturgy as incomplete, because the sacramental and sanctifying aspect is affirmed more, and the aspect of prayer is not sufficiently affirmed. Now, the fundamental aspect in liturgy is the worship that is rendered to God, an act of religion.
Then, opposing the increase in readings during Mass and the spread of the vernacular ("What will happen to the beautiful Gregorian melodies?"), he attacked the authors of the project and the idea of a sudden and artificial reform:
It is affirmed, of course, that only the hierarchy can change something in the liturgy, [...] but [...] we know from experience that it is not the bishops who ask for the changes, but some priests of the liturgical pastoral commissions , whose sole activity is to change something in the liturgy. [...] We must never forget that we must 'keep the traditions'; for that reason, changes should be accepted with great caution. What is Tradition, if not the work of the Church over time? And this work often supposes the fruit of the elaboration of many generations 29 .
The perspicacity of the Prelate is admirable. The proposed reform was anti-liturgical because it left aside the essential, divine worship, and underestimated the work of Tradition.
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