Guest-note: Did one of the main Vatican II documents distort the Words of Our Lord in the Gospel?
John Lamont: "For non-Latinists, this claim (it is a complete sentence in the conciliar document) can be translated as follows: 'For love of God and of neighbour is the first and greatest commandment'. No Latin is needed to realise that this is a flat contradiction of the teaching of Christ. There is a deliberate allusion in Gaudium et Spes 24 to the wording of the divine teaching it is contradicting, as can be seen from looking at the Vulgate text of that teaching..."
The second can be considered a part of first, in so far as the first provides the justification and the motivation for the second.
St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae II II 44, 2:
"The love of God is the end to which the love of our neighbor is directed. Therefore it behooved us to receive precepts not only of the love of God but also of the love of our neighbor, on account of those who are less intelligent,
who do not easily understand that one of these precepts is included in the other."
See also
II II 25, 1.
An embarrassing critique. Latin traditionalists really should be more circumspect, lest their zeal to conserve what they think to be Catholic teaching leads them to errors such as this. (A poor foundation in theology? Even a good conservative Thomist, or a good Thomist of "strict observance" would no better than to offer this.)
