Unveiling a new work on the Second Vatican Council in Rome, Cardinal Walter Brandmuller, the retired president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, announced that Vatican II’s decrees on non-Christian religions (Nostra Aetate) and Religious Freedom (Dignitatas Humanae) “do not have a binding doctrinal content, so one can dialogue about them.”
The comment–seen as a gesture to the Society of St. Pius X, now in talks with the Holy See about a possible reconciliation–naturally provoked controversy. Some traditionalists welcomed it as a sign that their criticisms about those documents have always been right, whereas Catholic Culture’s Dr. Jeff Mirus immediately cautioned: “While it is certainly true that a ‘dogmatic constitution’ is a weightier document than a ‘declaration,’ and is more likely to deal extensively with doctrinal issues, this does not mean that a declaration cannot have doctrinal content to which the faithful must assent.” He then persuasively explains why, with regard to Vatican II’s teaching on non-Christian religions and religious liberty.
In fairness to Cardinal Brandmuller, he also affirmed that all of the Conciliar documents “must be taken seriously as an expression of the living Magisterium;” and one of his co-authors, Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, added, importantly: “There must be an acceptance of the Council by those who want to be reunited with the Church. I don’t think the SSPX can say, ‘Well, we’ll set this or that document aside.’
Underscoring that point was an essay in the Osservatore Romano last December. Written by Msgr. Fernando Ocariz, who has been directly involved in the SSPX talks, it carefully follows the principals laid out by Pope Benedict in his famous talk about “the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal within continuity.” Ocariz’s analysis, notes Mirus, “says exactly the same thing” that faithful Catholics have been saying for years about Vatican II, namely:
Since it was an ecumenical council, meeting and promulgating its acts to the whole Church under the authority of the Pope, the Second Vatican Council’s doctrinal sentences demand assent in the following ways:
1. Whenever the Council teaches something about faith and morals, what it teaches is certainly true, either through the specific note of infallibility or from the religious submission of mind and will owed to the ordinary Magisterium.
2. If such a teaching on faith or morals appears to anyone to conflict with earlier teachings, the problem is not with the truth of the Council’s statement but with our understanding of the Church’s full teaching of which the Council’s statement is inescapably a part.
3. Proper method demands that an understanding of the matter in question be found that accepts the truth of all relevant statements. Later statements can be illuminated by earlier ones and earlier statements can be illuminated by later ones, until a more complete and precise understanding is formed.
4. Where the Council was not teaching on matters of faith and morals, such as where it was describing contemporary conditions or offering recommendations for renewal, its statements are to be received with respect and gratitude but are not necessarily flawless in either their factual accuracy or their prudential judgment.
5. It follows that any arguments which undermine this understanding, whether based upon the pastoral interests of the Council or any other factor, are specious.
Addressing all these issues successfully with the SSPX (or any other Catholics who have questions about Vatican II) will take good will, patience and prayer. But for the faithful Catholic, emphasizes Msgr. Ocariz, there can only be one reliable voice in the final analysis: “An authentic interpretation of Conciliar texts can only be made by the Magisterium of the Church herself.”
May 24th, 2012 | 12:39 pm
[...] Is Vatican II Completely Binding on Catholics? – William Doino, First Things/First Thghts [...]
May 24th, 2012 | 4:22 pm
““An authentic interpretation of Conciliar texts can only be made by the Magisterium of the Church herself.”
And it hasn’t made them on Vatican II, so Mirus’ comments are much ado about nothing. “…The religious submission of mind and will owed to the ordinary Magisterium” does not make soemthing true: it simply makes it the belief of the moment. And at this moment, such “beliefs” have wreaked more than their share of havoc.
May 24th, 2012 | 6:39 pm
I thought it was only liberals who were supposed to be interested in figuring out what they don’t have to believe.
May 24th, 2012 | 7:33 pm
To joe from a different Joe: First of all, the V II texts pretty much speak for themselves. Read them with openness and the understanding that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI stated–that V II is a continuation and illumination of the Catholic faith, not a departure–and it seems to me the documents themselves are very clear. If not clear in themselves, they have been clarified by a couple dozen or more encyclical letters, and the Catechism, published since then. Thus, it is simply wrong to say that the Magisterium has not made clear what V II is about.
May 25th, 2012 | 12:40 am
Any statement of the Council which is interpreted as derogating, reversing, or setting aside any defined dogma of any previous Council is a false interpretation.
The Council explicitly declined to define any new dogma.
There is absolutely nothing, therefore, in Vatican II which obliges any Catholic to believe anything that has not been believed always and everywhere and by everyone.
May 25th, 2012 | 3:23 am
As Newman said of Vatican I, in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk
“of a Council Perrone says, “Councils are not infallible in the reasons by which they are led, or on which they rely, in making their definition, nor in matters which relate to persons, nor to physical matters which have no necessary connexion with dogma.” Præl. Theol. t. 2, p. 492.”
And again, “Nor is a Council infallible, even in the prefaces and introductions to its definitions. There are theologians of name, as Tournely and Amort [Vid. Amort. Dem. Cr., pp. 205-6] who contend that even those most instructive capitula passed in the Tridentine Council, from which the Canons with anathemas are drawn up, are not portions of the Church’s infallible teaching; and the parallel introductions prefixed to the Vatican anathemas have an authority not greater nor less than that of those capitula.”
Thus, “ in those circumstances and surroundings of formal definitions, which I have been speaking of, whether on the part of a Council or a Pope, there may be not only no exercise of an infallible voice, but actual error. Thus, in the Third Council, a passage of an heretical author was quoted in defence of the doctrine defined, under the belief he was Pope Julius, and narratives, not trustworthy, are introduced into the Seventh.”
May 26th, 2012 | 7:48 pm
“I thought it was only liberals who were supposed to be interested in figuring out what they don’t have to believe.”
Which is why many liberals champion Vatican II, right, since it seems to discard a handful of older beliefs i.e. the exclusiveness of salvation, the unlimited extent of inerrancy, the extent of papal power. The council could do this since it operated under the guise of a pastoral versus dogmatic exercise, hence the crazily prolix nature of its documents. These required the Catechism to redefine perennial doctrine, since liberals were running wild with the VII documents in hand. Even as he issued it, JPII was decried. The reason some conservatives insist the Council was not dogmatic is because otherwise Catholic doctrine did not dimply develop, but also reversed itself… something supposedly impossible. And with that equation, we have the dilemma posed by the SSPX, “Christian Order,” and Ratzinger calling a VII document a “Counter Syllabus” of Errors. Ouch. Vatican II and the law of non-contradiction make uneasy bedfellows.
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