Tag Archives: Pope Benedict XVI

Why We Need Churches

June 14, 2020Church, Eucharist, SacramentsCorpus Christi, Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, New Adam, Pope Benedict XVI, Protestantism, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiaetwowingstogod@gmail.com

As we endure continued lockdowns, masks and church closings, a new consensus has arisen—“we don’t need a building to be a Church. We don’t need a structure to be Catholic.” I say new, but in truth it is old, half a millennium old. It is simply the Protestant spirit rearing its ugly head once again. Protestants don’t need a building because they aren’t, at least properly speaking, a Church. Catholics on the other hand do need a building to be a Church and the fact that we don’t immediately recognize this truth shows how deeply infused the Church has become with this Protestant spirit.

All true religion requires the offering of a sacrifice to God. St. Thomas even goes so far as to say that sacrifice is a precept of the natural law. A true sacrifice begins with an inward act in which a man “should tender submission and honor…to that which is above man.” But because man’s person is both interior and exterior, spirit and matter, his mode of offering inward acts of sacrifice must also include an outward expression. “Hence it is a dictate of natural reason that man should use certain sensibles, by offering them to God in sign of the subjection and honor due to Him, like those who make certain offerings to their lord in recognition of his authority” (ST II-II, q.85, a.1).

This helps to explain the near universal phenomenon within ancient religions of every ritual act of worship including as a constitutive element sacrifice. It also explains why the religion of the Old Testament portrays a continual groping for the perfect sacrifice that only finds its fulfillment in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Only in Him do we find a perfect fit between the interior and exterior acts; the perfect victim making the perfect sacrifice. The New Adam sets the sacrificial standard and becomes mankind’s representative. Through His representation, it remains for each man to re-present that sacrifice in order to make it his own.

Sacrifices must be offered from within a temple. A temple is the dwelling place of God and the place where God and man meet. The believer who is in a state of grace, that is one who has “put on Christ’ is one such meeting place enabling the man to offer a sacrifice to God. For the Protestant and our Catholic friend who has no need of a church building, this is sufficient. But for God, this is not yet sufficient. To be “a Church”, that is the People of God, they must also offer a sacrifice.

Making the People of God

What exactly makes the People of God a People? Unlike the Jewish People who were united by blood, the Church is truly catholic, uniting men and women of many different races. The Church then is a People because it is united by the Blood of Christ, the Blood poured out on Calvary and of which we partake in the Eucharist. As Saint Paul says, it is “The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17). It is the “bread that we break” that creates the communion that is the Church.

The Eucharist is what makes the Church the Church. Without it, there would be no Church because there would be nothing that unites us. St Thomas says that the Eucharist is the cause of “Ecclesiastical unity, in which men are aggregated through this Sacrament; and in this respect it is called ‘Communion’ or Synaxis. For Damascene says that ‘it is called Communion because we communicate with Christ through it, both because we partake of His flesh and Godhead, and because we communicate with and are united to one another through it’” (ST III q.73, a.4).

In commenting on St. Paul’s passage, Pope Benedict XVI says that “the Eucharist is instrumental in the process by which Christ builds Himself a Body and makes us into one single Bread, one single Body…It is the living process through which time and again, the Church’s activity of becoming the Church takes place…The Church is a Eucharistic fellowship. She is not just a people: out of the many peoples of which she consists there is arising one people, through the one table that the Lord has spread for us all.” If the Church were to cease making this living process which is the Eucharist manifest, then the Church would cease to be the Church.

The sacrifice of the Eucharist needs a Temple in which it may be offered. Therefore, the church is not “just a building”, but the fulfilment of the Jewish Temple and the sacrament of the Temple in Heaven. It offers a real experience of Heaven, even if it “only” does so sacramentally. So while the church building itself does not make us the Church, it is a necessary element for the formation of the Church. In short, without churches in which the Eucharist is offered there would be no Catholic Church.

Cutting Ourselves Off at the Knees

June 6, 2020Church Fathers, PrayerEphesians, Kneeling, Pope Benedict XVI, Prayer Posture, St. Thomas Aquinastwowingstogod@gmail.com

In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, the future Pope Benedict XVI frets over the fact that believers have grown unaccustomed to kneeling. Not prone to hyperbole, Ratzinger said that a “faith no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core” because it “no longer knows the One before Whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture” ( The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 194). His is a clarion call to the Faithful to rediscover both the necessity and power of kneeling during prayer.

By referring to kneeling as an “intrinsically necessary gesture,” Cardinal Ratzinger is making a profound point, that given our cultural malaise, we are prone to miss. A gesture can be necessary; necessary because as body-soul composites we are incapable of being “spiritual” without accompanying bodily postures. To divorce our bodily actions from our spiritual ones does not make us more spiritual, but makes us less human. Worship for man is done in his body and therefore must be reflected by his body bodies. Not only that, but his bodily posture affects his soul and disposes it to receive Divine gifts. Common sense would tells us that a man lying in a recliner and addressing Almighty God is far less likely to be disposed to receive the Divine Guest than a man standing at attention or kneeling. Summarizing then, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “thus external, physical symbols are shown to God for the purpose of renewing and spiritually training the inner soul. This is expressed in the prayer of Manasse: ‘I bend the knee of my heart.’ ‘For every knee shall be bowed to me: and every tongue shall swear’ (Is. 45:24)” (Commentary on Ephesians, Chapter 3, Lecture 4).

If our bodily posture conveys a message both to the outer and inner world, then what makes kneeling specifically necessary? There is, of course, the argument from authority. We kneel before “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 3:14) because God has commanded it. “Kneeling,” Ratzinger says, “does not come from any culture—it comes from the Bible and its knowledge of God. The central importance of kneeling in the Bible can be seen in a very concrete way. The word proskynein alone occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament” (The Spirit of the Liturgy, p.185). St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians says that “In the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” (Phil. 2:10). Kneeling is our response to Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. This helps to explain why it is also the preferred position of Christ Himself when He prays, especially when He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane (c.f. Luke 22:42). Since all of our prayer is simply a participation in His prayer, we should assume the same posture. More accurately, when we kneel down to pray, we are kneeling beside Christ Himself and praying with Him.

Why God Wants Us to Kneel

But God does not command us to perform anything without reason so that the reason for kneeling also matters. Kneeling is an exterior manifestation of our interior humility. It is a recognition, and even at times a reminder, of the fundamental chasm between us and God. Prayer, in order to be heard, must come from the place of humility (c.f. Ps 101:18, Sirach 35:21). For “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). Kneeling is an act of recognition of one’s weakness and insignificance. Also, because strength is found in the knee, to bend the knee is to make oneself weak and vulnerable. As Ratzinger says, to bend our knee is to bend our strength to the living God in acknowledgment of His lordship over us.

Kneeling then is good for us because it disposes us to receive God as He is and as we are. It is when we are on our knees that we are strongest—“for when I am weak, I am strong.” Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History gives us two examples of kneeling that further demonstrate the point. He tells of St. James the “brother of the Lord” having callouses on his knees from his constant prayer for others. Likewise, he gives an account of a certain Abba Apollo who saw the devil as a hideous creature with no knees. The Devil has no knees because he has rendered himself incapable of adoration. He cannot stoop at all because of his pride. He is, to use modern parlance, spiritual but not religious. At the heart of religion is giving to God what is due to Him so that modern man has lost the ability to kneel because he has ceased to be religious.

Kneeling is the only way in which we might see God. We must make ourselves smaller to see the Big Picture. This is why when Christ reveals Himself to soldiers who seek to arrest Him in the Garden, His words of self-revelation knock them to their knees. Likewise the Wise Men when they journey to meet the King of Kings must stoop to enter the cave in which He was born. It is only from that vantage point that He can be recognized. Kneeling is necessary to see God.

Catholic Environmentalism?

May 13, 2020Catholic Social Teaching, Creation, Culture, Culture of Life, Economics, Magisterium, MoraliltyEcology, Environment, John Paul II, Moral Ecology, Pollution, Pope Benedict XVItwowingstogod@gmail.com

In an address given during his return to Germany in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI called upon the legislators who had gathered not to neglect what he called the “ecology of man.” The ecology of man, that is, the realization that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will” is at the heart of environmental ecology. Although this was a recurring theme of the Pope, but his repeated call fell mainly on deaf ears because the care of the environment, like nearly all social issues, has been politicized. There is little interest in solving the problem, only using it to exert political control over other people. But for those who are interested in solving the problem, the Church has offered a true path forward with her emphasis on human ecology.

Although this used to go without saying, any discussion of the environment must first point out that man is different from all of the other visible creatures in the environment. He is not just one creature among many, but he is nature’s steward. Both sides of the debate recognize this fact, even if they loathe to admit it. Any discussion of environmental policy is predicated on the fact that only man is responsible for the environment. It would be absurd to speak of curbing man’s actions if he did not have the freedom to do so. In laying the responsibility for the environment at the feet of men, you are, at least implicitly, saying that he is different than the other animals and that he alone can offer a solution. This admission matters because it implies that man, as governor of creation, also transcends it.

Avoiding the Extremes

As awesome as it is then, we cannot worship nature as something divine. We reverence creation because it reveals the Creator, but it is not divine. It is, like all material things, passing away. We, made of matter and spirit, are above it, pilgrims as it were, just passing through. But just because it isn’t divine doesn’t mean that we can use it as we see fit. Nature is made up of natures, all of which must be respected, if they are going to actually serve mankind.

Like all issues that become political footballs, the environment is prey to the either/or fallacy. Either it must be divinized or it must be raped. Politics has no room for qualifications and the blame must always rest squarely on the other side. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church summarizes what might be called a “Catholic Environmentalism” when it says:

“A correct understanding of the environment prevents the utilitarian reduction of nature to a mere object to be manipulated and exploited. At the same time, it must not absolutize nature and place it above the dignity of the human person himself. In this latter case, one can go so far as to divinize nature or the earth, as can readily be seen in certain ecological movements that seek to gain an internationally guaranteed institutional status for their beliefs.”
CSD, 463

Fixing the Problem

But even with a correct understanding of the environment, we cannot fix the environmental problems without first practicing the “human ecology” proposed by Pope Benedict. Until we acknowledge that certain types of activities fulfill our nature and others don’t, the problem of the ecology of the environment will never be solved. These activities are known as virtues and it begins with the virtue of prudence. Prudence is the habit of governing our actions such that we only use things in a manner in which we truly thrive. Justice is the habit of taking responsibility for the effects our actions have on other people and not just being motivated by self-interest. Temperance is the habit of living with sufficiency and not hoarding resources because we can. Fortitude is the habit of remaining committed to the right use of the environment in the face of wide scale abuse where each person is trying to hoard as much as possible.

The environmental movement lacks any real teeth because they systematically ignore, what Pope Benedict called, “the inner pollution” of which the environmental pollution is just a consequence. They speak of what we ought to do, but still exalt license as if it was true freedom. You cannot promote license, especially in the sexual realm, while simultaneously demanding that people act temperately in their use of the environment. If you will (ab)use other people then you will most certainly abuse the environment. It will never gain any moral authority until it acknowledges a moral law. Without a true respect for human freedom and the conditions in which it thrives, it will have to resort to the hammer of power to beat all non-compliants into submission.

It is the inner pollution of overconsumption that causes untold damage to the environment. But until this is framed as fundamentally a moral problem, it will never get better. As John Paul II put it in his Message for the World Day of Peace in 1990:

“Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life style. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these cause. As I have already stated, the seriousness of the ecological issue lays bare the depth of man’s moral crisis. If an appreciation of the value of the human person and of human life is lacking, we will also lose interest in others and in the earth itself. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become a part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few.”

Environmental ecology then is a fruitless endeavor without first emphasizing a moral ecology. The crisis in the environment is first and foremost a catastrophic crisis in the moral environment of mankind. Until we solve that problem, we should only expect the environmental crisis to get worse. A Catholic Environmentalism then would be one that emphasizing the proper use of the environment by inculcating the necessary virtues.

Hope and the Mystery of Evil

September 7, 2019Atheism, Last Things, Mercy, TheologyCS Lewis, Desire, Faith, Hope, Justice, Last Judgment, Mercy, Pope Benedict XVI, Reason, Revelation, Romans 8, Spe Salvitwowingstogod@gmail.com

Atheists, at least those who are honest, often cite the problem of suffering as their main obstacle to believing in God. They reason that if there is a loving God, then there wouldn’t be so much suffering. A believer may counter with the burden of free will, but that really only accounts for the moral evils in this world. What about the natural evils, those like we see in the wake of hurricane, where suffering and death seem to be everywhere? The problem facing the believer is how he can explain a mystery, that is the mystery of evil, to one who does not yet have faith. And so, the unbeliever goes away with only more reasons for disbelief. But if we are to give them reasons for belief, then we must be willing to dive into this question a little more deeply.

Evil and suffering are, as we said, a mystery. The word mystery comes from the Greek word mysterion which literally means closed. Mysteries, at least in the sense we are using it here, are closed to the rational mind. The human mind, unaided by revelation, can not even conceive of the mystery. Once it is revealed, it becomes intelligible, but the light of full understanding cannot be seen. The mystery of evil is one such revealed truth that, absent the gift of divine faith, is completely incomprehensible. No amount of reasoning about suffering and evil could ever bring us to the point where we could conclude that “all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Hope and the Desire for Justice

Even if we could intellectually assent to this truth, it remains elusive because it is also the foundation of the theological virtue of hope. Like faith, hope is a gift and not something we can earn. It resides in the will and acts like a holy fortitude that enables us to habitually cling to the truth of God’s Word even in the presence of manifold evils. It is in “hope we are saved” (Romans 8:24). At every corner, the believer is tempted to despair, that is, to give up on the fact that God always fulfills His promises so we should not be surprised when the unbeliever, who lives without these supernatural gifts, finds no seeds of hope in this world.

Lacking supernatural faith and hope, it would seem that the unbeliever’s ears remain permanently closed to any possible theological explanation. It only seems that way however when we ask an important question. Why is it that the unbeliever expects things to be otherwise? The answer, once it is uttered, turns the issue on its head. What makes evil and suffering so bad in the mind of the unbeliever is that it appears to be indiscriminate; favoring, if anything the guilty more than the innocent. Peeling back a layer of his thoughts he will find that, like all men, he has an innate desire for justice. This desire, even if it is unacknowledged cannot be stamped out. He finds within himself a fundamental paradox—”there is no God and yet I expect justice.”

Every true desire that we have has an object. We experience hunger and there is food, we experience loneliness there are companions, we desire knowledge, there are things to be known. We could go on and on listing our desires and find that each matches to some object. Justice however remains mostly elusive. We certainly believe there is an object, or else all the political machinations in which we try to create a utopic paradise are pointless. But those objects have proven to be woefully inadequate. It is reasonable then to expand our horizons.

This line of reasoning is not unlike CS Lewis’ argument from desire, except that it points towards an event—the Last Judgment. The Last Judgment, the moment when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, will be first and foremost an event of justice. Every injustice will be set right, every wrong righted, everlasting crowns given to those who suffered injustice and everlasting shame to those who doled it out. The judgment of history will be corrected and “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” Justice will be served.

The Final Judgment as a Beacon of Hope

In short, the desire for justice is meant to serve as a signpost pointing towards the truth of eternal life. Pope Benedict XVI calls this “the most important motive for believing in eternal life” in Spe Salvi, his second encyclical:

There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ’s return and for new life become fully convincing.
Spe Salvi (SS) #43

Following this line of reasoning a little further, we see that the unfulfilled desire for justice in this life becomes a beacon of hope for the next. It is according to God’s Providential design that justice will be lacking in this world precisely to spur our desire for the next. Revelation then becomes the venue where desire meets object. The heart testifies and Revelation answers.

Based on this view, the Pope wants us to correct our view of the Final Judgment and see it in the light of the Good News. “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope” (SS, 44). When we see it as part and parcel of the Good News as a response to man’s universal longing for justice, its evangelical power can be unleashed.

Worshipping Like the Early Christians

March 9, 2019Church Fathers, Eucharist, Evangelization, History, SacramentsBreaking of the Bread, Early Church, House Church, Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI, Protestantism, Worshiptwowingstogod@gmail.com

One of the ironies associated with the proliferation of Protestant sects is that it has been marked by a certain antiquarianism in which the various groups try to return the style of worship that marked the early Church. Often lampooned as a “dude starting a church in his garage”, the number of “house churches” in various forms continues to multiply as they try to recapture the spirit of the early Christians. But none of them can quite get it right, partly because in rejecting Tradition, they can find no touchpoint from which to launch their liturgical crusade. Their nostalgic zeal is certainly laudable, but once we look closely at the early Church we find that the early Christians themselves would most certainly have shunned these new “house churches”.

According to Acts 2:42, early Christianity was anchored by two buoys: “the teachings of the Apostles and the breaking of the bread and the prayers.” These two elements really formed a single whole such that they could not be put asunder. Those who tried were branded heretics. Writing in 107AD, on his way to be martyred in Rome, the disciple of John the Evangelist, St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Philadephians (4), “Take heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever you do, you may do it according to [the will of] God.” This theme of unity, founded on the connection to Apostolic teaching (one bishop) and the breaking of the bread (one Eucharist), is merely a recurring theme that started on that same day of Pentecost described in Acts. We find it repeated in St. Clement of Rome’s letter to the Corinthians (c.f. Ch. 37, 44) and St. Paul’s first letter to that same church in Corinth (c.f. 1 Cor 10:17, 11:17-28). These two anchors were exactly what set Christianity apart from Judaism in both belief and practice.

Orderly Worship

The Church Fathers of the first and second centuries, those who still had “the voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” firmly believed and taught that communal worship of God was to follow a certain form. Anyone who has attempted to plod their way through Leviticus and Numbers would have to admit they had a point. This certain form, “this reasonable worship”, was given to them by God because it was pleasing to Him (and thus sanctifying for them). This orderly worship did not cease with the New Covenant (as the Last Supper shows us) but continued in a new form. The call to order in worship is at the heart of St. Clement’s letter to the Corinthians as a response to their liturgical revolution. He told them “We must do all things that the Lord told us to do at the stated times in proper order”(Letter to the Corinthians,40). He who knew the Apostles personally firmly believed that the ordering of the liturgy was something revealed to the Apostles and therefore ought to be passed on. It is this “proper order” that the various sects are trying to capture.

This spirit is praiseworthy even if, ultimately, they fail for reasons we shall see shortly. Praiseworthy because most Protestants and many Catholics who want to hijack the liturgy see worship as a form of communal self-expression. This attitude is entirely misguided. As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, “real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship Him. In any form, liturgy includes some kind of ‘institution’. It cannot spring from imagination, our own creativity—then it would remain just a cry in the dark or mere self-affirmation.” Worship is always both reflective and formative of belief. For God to reveal what to believe while at the same time leaving worship up to man is to risk losing revelation.

To illustrate his point, Pope Benedict XVI uses the example of the golden calf. He points out that there is really a subtle apostasy going on. It is not that they are worshipping a false god, but that they have made their own image (something they were prohibited from doing) of the True God. “The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring Him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world” (Spirit of the Liturgy, 22). If we are to approach the unapproachable, then we must be given the path by which we might mount Jacob’s ladder. This, my Catholic readers, is why you must never muck with the liturgy. This my Protestant friends is why you should rethink the form of your “praise and worship” services. How do you know they are acceptable to God?

The Early Mass

That being said, what did the first Christian worship services look like? St. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, gives us an outline in two places in his First Apology (65,67). Rather than quote it in full, we can look at it in outline form:

Lessons from Scripture of indeterminant number
Sermon
Dismissal of Non-Christians and Prayers
Kiss of Peace
Offertory
Eucharistic Prayer
Memory of Passion including words of institution
Great Amen
Communion under Both Kinds (Deacons take to those absent)
Collection for the Poor

Fr. Adrian Fortescue in his book, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy, offers some details of each of the elements which are summarized below. First, it is worth mentioning that at certain times, what they called the synaxis and we would call the Liturgy of the Word (elements 1-4) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (5-10) would be celebrated at different times. But it wasn’t long before it was a single celebration. Because the Church thought it was always fitting to preach the Gospel, elements 1-4 were always open to anyone. But once the community began to pray together, the non-Christians were dismissed. This was done both out of reverence to the Eucharist and because to the uninitiated it would have been very difficult to understand and easy to mock.

With very minor differences, mostly with respect to the Kiss of Peace, a Catholic of today would feel at home in such a liturgy. Likewise a Catholic in the first Century would feel at home in ours. There is a certain corollary that is attached to this and it is the fact that all the liturgies of the early Christians were marked by uniformity. They looked the same whether you were in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria or Jerusalem. And this was because they believed the form was directly from the Apostles. There was nothing like a GIRM, but when we find liturgical manuals in the 4^th Century from the various Churches they are almost identical even in the text of the prayers. There is of course a practical reason for this. The Church began in Jerusalem. Every Church that was a missionary Church of Jerusalem would follow the rubrics of the Jerusalem Church. By the middle of the 1^st Century, every Church is connected directly to one of the four patriarchies—Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. If there is uniformity in those four then you would expect it to occur in all the missionary Churches as well. As a young bishop succeeded an older bishop, he would be expected to follow the way the older bishop did things.

There is a second aspect as well that follows from the desire for order. The liturgy was uniform and orderly because it allowed for the laity to participate. They knew when to respond and how. They knew when it was time for the Great Amen and when it was time for Communion. The Church Militant was a well-disciplined and well-practiced army.

Finally, just as in Israel, Scripture was first and foremost a liturgical book. They drew many of the prayers and forms of those prayers directly from Scripture. The early Christians, even those who were not literate, regularly imbibed Scripture in the liturgy and were far from ignorant. This connection between Scripture and the Liturgy is often overlooked, even though down to our own day we are exposed to it throughout the Liturgy (and not just in the readings).

The Breaking of the Bread, what the Latin Church would later call the Mass, stood at the center of the Church’s early life. This legacy, rather than covered in the dust of history, is found in the Mass of today, a fact that becomes obvious once we study the early Church.

The Spirit of Vatican II?

August 9, 2017Vatican IIAggiornamento, Inculturation, Pope Benedict XVI, Second Vatican Council, Spirit of Vatican IItwowingstogod@gmail.com

Shortly after announcing his abdication of the papal throne, Pope Benedict XVI met with the clergy of Rome and spoke (unscripted) to them about the Second Vatican Council. As a man who was both present at the Council and spent a great deal of his pastoral life energies in implementing it, his comments are particularly relevant as the Church continues to make sense of what St. John Paul II called the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church in the third millennium.

Volumes could be written on what the Pope Emeritus said that day, there is one point in particular that is worthy of mentioning and that is the struggle within the Church to authentically interpret the Council and to implement it. This is because there were actually two Councils that “occurred” which Benedict calls the real council and the virtual council. The latter he saw as a Council of the media in which, led by the press, the teachings of the Council were presented as wholly new. Thanks to a decided advantage of being able to capture the limited attention span of the priests and laymen in the pew, the “real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.”

Of course, any authentic understanding of the Council must begin by examining its purpose. In an address that he gave to open the second period of the Second Vatican Council, Blessed Paul VI emphasized the pastoral character of the Council and went on to define its four purposes. They were to come up with a fuller definition of the notion of the Church, to renew the Church, to promote the restoration of unity among all Christians and to initiate a dialogue with the contemporary world. Perhaps the most overarching theme was the necessity of the Church to be in dialogue with the modern world. In fact, in the Papal Bull convoking the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, St. John XXIII said that the Council was called “to place the modern world in contact with the life-giving and perennial energies of the Gospel.” The Pope proposed that this encounter with the world would be carried out through a process of what he called aggiornamento.

As the Church has expanded into different cultures throughout history, she has always done so by a spirit of inculturation. The Church would look at each new culture and see what elements could be “baptized,” helping to explain the truths of the faith by using something the people were already familiar with. Think of it as using parables in time. Parables used some familiar image and make some change to it in order to highlight a truth that had never been seen before (like the farmer who everyone would think “stupid” throwing seed on the walkway to show the “recklessness” of God in giving grace). So something like local gods were replaced with patron saints—not gods, but powerful intercessors before the One True God but with powers for good similar to their local gods.

Aggiornamento

Although the word Aggiornamento literally means updating, it is more accurately described as being akin to inculturation, except as applied to a specific time rather than a specific culture. The Church wanted to examine the modern paradigm, especially the prevailing philosophies and see what elements could be “baptized” to better explain the Faith to the modern world.

Why this was even necessary was because the spirit of the world had eclipsed the Christian spirit. The Church had been true leaven in the world for a number of centuries and that was no longer the case. Previously Christian societies were becoming non-Christian, or even decidedly anti-Christian. In other words, the Church and the World had grown such that they were once again at odds with each other. This led to a prevailing attitude of pessimism about anything “secular” and a rejection of anything that didn’t have its source in the Church. This pessimism led to the formation of Catholic ghettos and a serious loss of apostolic zeal.

Even if the members of the City of God wanted to be apostolic, they lacked the language to engage those who lived in the City of Man. Thus a need to examine the world and see which elements could be included in the Church’s explanation of Revelation and herself.

In order to counter this pessimism, the Council Fathers thought it necessary to point out the positive aspects of the elements of the surrounding culture. And this is where Pope Benedict’s identification of the two councils is particularly apt. Because many aspects, heretofore only mentioned in a negative way, are now mentioned in a positive way it appears to be a “change” in the Church’s teaching. Since the council of the media will only report news, i.e. that which is “new,” then most people will only hear about change. It will appear as if the Church is finally updating the faith and getting with the times. If those things changed, then why can’t everything change with the world? And thus we see the invention of the virtual council’s “Spirit of Vatican II.”

In short, there was a widespread tendency to fall into the most fatal of all fallacies, what I call the “either/or” fallacy. Fatal, because to be Catholic is to see “both/and.” This should not surprise us since the basis of our faith is that Jesus is not either God or man, but both God and man. How this applies to the Council is that it was never intended to replace the negative with the positive. It emphasized the positive so that we could see the wheat amongst the chaff. It never meant to say that we should swallow the chaff with the wheat or to say that it was all wheat.

The Power of the Footnote

Take for example the Council’s teachings on other religions, a point that Philip Trower makes in his excellent book on the Council called Truth and Turmoil. There are two ways of looking at other religions. They can be seen as systems of belief that make a claim on man’s total allegiance and thus as obstacles to the Gospel or they can be viewed as man’s groping for truth without the help of divine revelation and therefore contains seeds of truth even if imbedded in error. It is in the latter sense that it is a preparation for the Gospel. The Council’s emphasis on the latter was just that, a point of emphasis, and not a rejection of the first viewpoint. Both, of course, are (still)true.

This is why Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly insisted that the “spirit of Vatican II is in the letter.” What he meant is that you had better read the documents of the real council and not the virtual council before rendering judgement on what actually happened. Many people are surprised at the contents of the documents when they actually read them. We all have a tendency to skip over footnotes when reading, but with Church documents it is important to pay attention to them. They are not merely “prooftexts” but show how the teaching fits within Tradition. Before you quickly rule something as “new” or “changed” you better make sure the footnotes don’t say something different than your interpretation. There is great power in the footnotes.

Rather than fall victim an “either/or” mentality, it bears mention that even the “real council” is not without its problems. But rather than emphasize those problems the question is how to move forward. It was a valid Council and any Catholic that bears the name must believe that the teaching of any Council ratified by the reigning pope will always be capable of a Catholic interpretation. That interpretation might not be clear and it may be convoluted because of poor wording.

I don’t think John Paul II was exaggerating or wearing rose colored glasses when he viewed the Council as a gift. What this means though is that we must look at what the Holy Spirit had in mind when He called (or allowed it to be called) the Council. That is where the true interpretation lies. In a time when the Church is greatly divided, it may be the Council and its authentic interpretation that unites us. This starts with a personal commitment from all the Faithful to read, study and pray through the documents.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"Pope St. John Paul II