Two Perspectives on Vatican II

The first is from theologian and bishop Franco Giulio Brambilla, as relayed by Sandro Magister: A Bishop and Theologian Breaks the Silence Over the “Banality” of Viganò and Company

In fact, this is the contribution of the most significant statements of this last decade, before, during, and after Pope Benedict's statement in 2005.
We could outline the theme of the legacy in three moves:
a) Vatican II as style: to resume the original way in which the council fathers (which historical studies have made known to us) posed problems with the method and resources that they put to work in order to propose a response to the challenges of their time in the interaction between subjects, textual “corpus,” and new readers;
b) the principle of pastorality: to bring out the originality of Vatican II, its creative ideas and its basic intuitions in the areas of both method and content;
c) the future of the Council: to rediscover the state of invention that characterized that epochal turning point and that today needs, at the beginning of the third millennium, a creative recovery and a new ecclesial pragmatics.

And the following is from Adam DeVille: Vatican II as “chosen trauma” and “chosen glory”.

If nothing else, the decision to be faced by Catholics today is whether we will allow ourselves to manifest the maturity necessary to stop treating Vatican II as either a trauma or a glory and instead to see it as all councils from our past: an event where some of the crooked lines of human history were used by God to write straight the salvation of the world. If He is content to leave some lines askew on the page, some tares and wheat in the fields of the Church until the end of the age (cf. Matt. 13: 24-30), why can we not grant ourselves the same freedom to stop clinging to pseudo-intellectual genealogies helpful to nobody and instead get to work healing today’s myriad crises in Church and world alike?

Even though DeVille is Ukrainian Catholic, he assumes that Vatican II was an ecumenical council, or at least a council of both Roman Catholics and of Eastern Catholics. As far as I'm concerned, even if various Eastern Catholic bishops signed the documents, that does not make Vatican II an ecumenical council, and even the claim that it was a "general" council of the churches in communion with the bishop of Rome is question, given the lack of equal weight given to Eastern perspectives. I see it in content and function as being a synod of the Latin churches in communion with the bishop of Rome, and it needs to be understood carefully: not as an ecumenical council, but as a Latin council with certain pretensions, to be historically situated in the development of the Roman papacy in the second millenium and with reference to the claims of Rome, which go back to the first millenium. It also must be understood with the proximate and not-so-proximate causes that lead up to the council, which explain why Latin bishops and theologians thought some sort of reform was necessary.

Adam DeVille on John Paul II

CWR: John Paul II: Diagnostician of Divisions, Doctor of Ecumenism by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
In the encyclical Ut Unim Sint, given twenty five years ago, the late pope wrote about “the necessary purification of past memories,” a consistent and urgent theme of his pontificate.

Deville uses both Taft and John Paul II for a discussion of the healing of memories. That certainly is a necessary part of reconciliation.

Nevertheless, there are more recent and more hopeful signs. These have increased with Constantinople’s granting of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church last year. With Russia thereby losing control over much of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in 2019, the latter remains free to deepen the healing in its already amicable and often co-operative relationship with Ukrainian Catholics.

Whether what is going on in Ukraine is a helpful development or not remains to be seen. The jockeying between Moscow and Constantinople needs to end (and recognition of Roman primacy is not the quick solution that Latin polemicists would make it to be); this may require further humbling of both historic sees by God. There needs to be ecclesial reform happening in many churches, but not the changes that liberal progressives want.

Eastern Catholic Theology

Spiritual Restoration

The Funeral of Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ

Orientale Lumen TV:






via Byz, TX

John Allen on Fr. Taft

Church’s leading scholar on the East was, from beginning to end, his own man by John L. Allen Jr.

Fr. Taft's Berakah Award Acceptance Speech

Pray Tell: Robert Taft Acceptance Speech: Berakah Award

Fr. Taft, "Liturgy: Model of Prayer, Icon of Life"

The first part of a series.



Book available from ECP

Sr. Vassa Larin on Fr. Robert Taft, SJ

Fr. Robert Taft, SJ Passes

Eternal memory.



Aleteia
Pray Tell





Eastern Province notice, with a reflection from Fr. John Baldovin, SJ



His comments on the reform of the Roman rite will remain controversial.

NCR Interview from 2011 "Of Liturgy and Life"
"A Jesuit Bridge-builder in Rome"

Eh?

If anything, the Anglican Ordinariate liturgy is closer to the Byzantine-rite Divine Liturgy than the Extraordinary Form of the Roman rite.

Eastern Christian Books: In Praise of Robert F. Taft, S.J.

Eastern Christian Books: In Praise of Robert F. Taft, S.J.

Who Can Block the Holy Spirit?

I read Matthew Levering's Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Regarding the Holy Spirit’s unitive mission in the Church, Levering responds to Kendall Soulen, who focuses on relationship between the Holy Spirit and multiplicity or diversity, by emphasizing the Holy Spirit’s promotion of unity in truth and unity in charity, the bond that unites the Church. I was reminded of the Kontakion hymn in the Byzantine rite for the feast of Pentecost, which contrasts God’s dispersal of mankind at Babel with His calling of all to become His people at Pentecost. God’s undoing of the tower Babel is not through the Church having a single, uniform language and culture, but through the unifying of diverse peoples with their own Christianized languages and cultures. But as we see in the history of the estrangement between Catholics and Orthodox, and the early separation of the Oriental, or Non-Chalcedonian, Orthodox churches and the Assyrian Church of the East, differences in languages or terminology (as mentioned above in the dispute over the Filioque), exacerbated by political issues, nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and other factors, have been significant barriers to agreement and communion. But the greatest cause of the failure of the apostolic churches to reach full communion in the past may have been insufficient charity (and humility). In relation to the Holy Spirit’s mission of unity, it seems to me that the zeal of bishops to preserve the unity of faith may have surpassed their zeal for charity. In this respect, the tasks of the Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils remain incomplete (though the various apostolic churches have in the last half-century issued statements with other churches that they do not really disagree on the important issues of Christology). All must examine their conscience or the churches will continue to be chastised. The Holy Spirit is the force behind healing and reconciliation; but can it even be said that in defense of Bouyer's thesis in The Church of God, that the Holy Spirit has never failed to preserve those who have no fault in the separation in the unity of faith and charity, even though some of their bishops may have thought otherwise and excluded each other from communion?

Anamnesis, Not Amnesia: The 'Healing Memories' and the Problem of 'Uniatism' by Father Robert Taft, S.J.
Ecumenism and healing of memories; ecclesiological issues?

Would Like to Read This

From Potlucks, Eucharist, and Ecumenical Dialogue by Nicholas Denysenko:

"In the January 2015 issue of Worship, Archimandrite Robert F. Taft, S.J., appealed to Catholic and Orthodox Christians to reinvigorate efforts for an authentic restoration of ecclesial intercommunion between the two Churches."

Didn't know Fr. Denysenko wrote for Pray Tell.

Jesuit Calls on Catholic and Orthodox Churches to Restore Communion

From 2010:

Post by Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.

His paper.

The Society of Jesus Promoting a Latin-centric View of the Church?

India: in renewing the Church, Pope Francis 'has woken up' the Society of Jesus

"He has also reminds us that the Church cannot remain closed in on itself (one possible reason why the Society of Jesus was suppressed was because the Society became closed in on itself), but must reach out not only to the whole world but to the whole of creation."

Lest the Jesuits forget... Anamnesis, Not Amnesia: The 'Healing Memories' and the Problem of 'Uniatism'

10 Questions with Archimandrite Robert Taft

At Pray Tell

Fr. Taft doesn't think Latin traditionalists are traditional but maybe he should try to see things from their perspective, even if their understanding of liturgical participation may be erroneous? I have no idea what his position on "ad orientem" worship may be given his comments below.

He has a forthcoming book: Beyond East and West 2: Problems in Ecumenical Understanding

Pope Francis good for liturgical renewal or not?

Papa Francesco is good for everything, including liturgical renewal. When he first celebrated Mass in the Sistine Chapel he had them toss out the altar facing away from the congregation that his predecessor had installed, and thereby gave the signal indicating how he rated the reformed Vatican II liturgy vis-à-vis the restored pre-Vatican II Summorum Pontificum “extraordinary form.”

Is the Vatican II liturgical renewal secure or endangered?

I think it is secure, because I believe the vast majority of Catholic people throughout the world confirm it by voting with their feet and going to Mass in the reformed rite, showing thereby that despite the right-wing neo-con wackos (hereafter NCW’s), most Catholics prefer the reformed rite.

But that does not mean that the NCW’s are not a threat, since it is said that large numbers of them now control the terrain in our seminaries. As Professor Massimo Faggioli, the Catholic point-man on these issues has shown, the Vatican II Liturgical Constitution was the fundamental document that led the way to the rest of Vatican II, so an attack against that key document is an attack against the guiding spirit of the Vatican II Council.

Anything good coming out of Summorum Pontificum?

Nope, unless creating unnecessary divisions in the Church and driving crazy our harried bishops who have too few priests to start with and now have to try and accommodate the NCW’s is considered “good.”

Something interesting comments on the episcopacy and apostolic succession:

This question also involves a cluster of other issues that I believe need to be reconsidered:

[a] the whole question of conceiving apostolic succession via the “relay race pass the baton model” is questionable, since it is probably not provable with historical verisimilitude for any Church on earth, including that of Rome. It is not clear that Rome originally had a monarchical episcopate rather than some sort of collegial governing body, possibly presbyteral, in the earliest post-apostolic era.

Some books to get, based on Fr. Taft's recommendations:
Liturgy: Model of Prayer — Icon of Life (Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications 2008)."

Alan Bouley’s From Freedom to Formula. The Evolution of the Eucharistic Prayer from Oral Improvisation to Written Texts

Fr. Hunwicke responds to Archimandrite Taft regarding which councils are to be considered ecumenical? (via NLM) See also his subsequent posts.

Fr. Taft on Antiphonal Psalmody

Part 2 of the NLM Interview with Dom Alcuin Reid

The 'Consilium ad Exsequendam' at 50 - An Interview with Dom Alcuin Reid (Part 2)

NLM: Were there any persons who, in your opinion, should or should not have been included on the committee? If so, why?

Dom Alcuin: Eleven pages of an appendix to Archbishop Bugnini’s memoirs, The Reform of the Liturgy (Liturgical Press), lists the personnel. Many of these had been involved in the commission for liturgical reform of Pius XII, the preparatory liturgical commission or the conciliar liturgical commission. Names such as Jungmann, Gy, Botte, Martimort, Righetti, feature rightly enough amongst the consultors. Interestingly Louis Bouyer was only included in 1966. Antonelli was one of the members; Bishop Jenny also. And there were bishop members from around the world who were regarded as having shown interest in the liturgy at the Council.

And a reference to Fr. Bouyer's memoirs:

NLM: During and after the Council, there was a great deal of talk in the Church about “collegiality” between the Pope and the bishops. Sacrosanctum Concilium itself says in no. 25 that “(t)he liturgical books are to be revised as soon as possible; experts are to be employed on the task, and bishops are to be consulted, from various parts of the world.” Were the bishops consulted by the Consilium? If so, to what extent? Were the reforms carried out as an act of collegiality between the Pope and the world-wide episcopate?

Dom Alcuin: Certainly there were bishops from dioceses across the world on the Consilium. And some schemas were sent to Bishops Conferences before the 1967 Synod of Bishops. But it is simply not true to assert that “every suggested adaptation, change, or modification was sent out to every Catholic bishop in the world” and that “when changes were severely questioned or opposed by a large number of bishops, they were revised according to the will of the bishops and then sent back again.” (Robert Taft SJ, Interview, 4 Nov. 2009) Bugnini describes the relationship with the world’s bishops in chapter 14 of his memoirs—and it is a very different account from Father Taft’s. The Consilium had ongoing contact with the Episcopal conferences, certainly, but one only has to read Cardinal Heenan’s letters to see how a residential Archbishop regarded the reform as something imposed by ‘Rome’ regardless of local bishops’ views (cf. A Bitter Trial, Ignatius Press).

Msgr Martimort, the Relator (co-ordinator of the working group) for the reform of the Liturgy of the Hours, explained to me in an interview that after consultation with experts he presented two position papers to the Consilium plenary meeting, which decided on which to follow and on appropriate revisions. After this, Martimort complained vigorously, Bugnini ignored these decisions and himself proposed another course to Paul VI—which was the one adopted. This ‘Paul VI approves what Bugnini-wants’ is a significant factor in the postconciliar reform, a fact underlined also by details recounted in the memoirs of Louis Bouyer, still sadly unpublished.

So too in 1969, the by-then Archbishop Jenny wrote to Paul VI because he believed he had “a duty in conscience” to utter “a cry of alarm” about “the liturgy in general and the divine office in particular” because of influences outside of the Consilium and outside of its normal working methods. Co-operation within the Consilium itself was questionable!