Conciliar Octet by Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P.

(New York: Ignatius Press, 2019-08-26), 182

"This 'octet' plays a harmonious music for Christians of a classical temper—that is, for those who take their bearing from an interpretation of the Scripture consonant with the Creeds, from the historic liturgies, from the Father and mediaeval Doctors, and the great dogmatic theologians of modern times, and the spirituality and morality that belong with these."

Fr.. Nichols gives an appropriately snarky but straightforward commentary on the Vatican II documents. He gives an orthodox interpretation in a hermeneutic of continuity, which is necessary to keep progressive Catholics from revising the council, and because it's too important a task to be left to traditionalist Catholics. Frequently he calls out the common error of interpreting Vatican II by citing a line that sounds progressive and not reading or ignoring the rest of the text that is in continuity with Tradition. Throughout, he gives helpful commentary on the source of the texts, their drafts and how they moved through the Council to become the final texts we know today as Vatican II.

Notes


Contents


Preface

Not another book on the Second Vatican Council! Just as progressive Catholics are constantly revisiting the Council so as to tell again the story of their liberation from the ancient pharaoh of the older Catholicism, so it is, alas, incumbent on orthodox Catholics to revisit the texts in a better frame of mind than that of their liberal rivals. This is less often done, and it is too important a task to be left to traditionalist Catholics who can find in the Council nothing more than a damnable débâcle.

This, at any rate, is the spirit in which I offer the present short study to the Church public. The reader should note: I have made no attempt to provide a bibliography commensurate with the volume of literature available in various languages. It would be vast.

Chapter 1: On Interpreting the Council

  • Bologna School: interpret as an "event" where the texts take a minor place (10)
    • Relies upon "Reception Theory" that judges a council by its reception. But validity is one thing and reception is another: reception does not confer validity (11)
  • "The only proper way to approach the conciliar texts is to take them as they stand." Extratextual considerations should be limited to the process of devising and revising the texts, because this shows how those who composed and voted for the texts understood them and wanted them to be understood. (12)
  • Hermeneutic of continuity: The entire corpus of texts must be seen ultimately from the standpoint of Tradition as a whole. "The perennial Tradition of the church has to be the principal vantage point in assessing these texts." (13)
  • Henri de Lavalette "early emphasized the very diverse level of authority within the corpus of [Vatican II] texts." (13) Look for phrases like "This holy synod teaches", or "We believe" (15)
  • The great majority of the Council's statements are not fides divina et Catholica but fides ecclesiastica, "ecclesiastical faith", or "official Magisterium when formal revelation is not at stake. Rejection of statements made at this level would not be heresy, though it would estrange one from the mainstream thinking of the contemporary church." (16)
  • "This 'octet' plays a harmonious music for Christians of a classical temper—that is, for those who take their bearing from an interpretation of the Scripture consonant with the Creeds, from the historic liturgies, from the Father and mediaeval Doctors, and the great dogmatic theologians of modern times, and the spirituality and morality that belong with these." (17)

Chapter 2: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (SC)

  • First text published, and relatively uncontroversial; the only one of the draft documents left largely intact (19)
  • The reform of the Roman-Rite Liturgy of Holy Week in 1951-1952 by Pius XII was the first installment of a wider revision to come (20)
  • "After the Council was over, the Oriental liturgies of the Easter Christians in union with Rome often underwent changes modeled on those in the contemporary West—with results by no means always beneficial" (22)
  • How reforms overstepped SC (23-24):

In point of fact, the constitution sometimes would drop below this level, calling for very particular changes to which the adjectives "intermediate" and "middle-level" do not easily apply. One example would be the abolition of the Office of Prime, known in the Latin tradition since as long ago as the fifth century. The natural assumption is that the Council Fathers considered these particular changes to be sufficiently weighty that they could not be made by a bureau of the Roman Curia without the explicit sanction of the Council. It is, therefore, strange that, after the Council ended, the body charged with executing the provisions of the constitution, a committee responsible to such a bureau, did not scruple to make decisions more weighty still—such as the composition of new Canons of the Mass, thereby breaking an even older tradition according to which the Roman Church prays at the Holy Eucharist only one Canon. This serious alteration lacked all conciliar sanction, and it brings home as plainly as anything can the element of inconsistency in the conciliar and post-conciliar process in matters liturgical.

Chapter 3: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (LG)

  • Continues the theme of a "salvation-historical presentation of doctrine" as in SC (45)
  • "The mystery of the Church is a mystery of divine-human intamacy, and inevitably, then, it contains a call to holiness." (46-47)
  • "subsistit in" ("subsists in") opened a door to the subsequent recognition of the ecclesiality of non-Catholic churches and ecclesial communities in UR (52-53)

Chapter 4: Decree on the Catholic Oriental Churches (OE)

  • The reunion with Orthodoxy was a though in the background of this decree on the eastern churches (61)
  • Eastern churches had "liturgy wars" as well: "Pastoral adaption and return to ancestral traditions are clearly not the asme thing." (69)
  • In trying to be open to the Orthodox, the council made some statements that were easily interpreted as being condescending, aggressive, or overly forward.

Chapter 5: Decree on Ecumenism (UR)

  • Augustin Bea was the inspiration behind Divino Afflante Spiritu, the "charter of modern Catholic biblical studies" (76)
  • The Holy Spirit is the principle of the unity of the Church (82)
  • "The language of communion, whether perfect or imperfect, is the chief basis for saying the ecclesiology of Vatican II is an ecclesiology of communion." (83)
  • "The achievement of the ecumenists Yves Congar and Augustin Bea at the Council was to apply Thomas' doctrine of baptismal character to heretics and schismatics." (85)
  • "The claim of the same article that in Catholic teaching there is a 'hierarchy of truths' was sadly abused in the post-conciliar period by those who believed it licensed the marginalization of a number of doctrines. They evidently did not read the entire article, short as it is, for it includes the words 'It is of course essential that doctrine be clearly presented in its entirety.'" (88-89)
  • Plurality is praised by virtue of the "essential superabundance of revelation" (91-92)

Chapter 6: Declaration on the Church's Relations with Non-Christian Religions (NA)

  • "Both the Declaration on Christian Education and the Decree on the Means of Social Communication played their part in the emergence after the Council of a new sort of ecclesiastical language: a benign, portentous language of overlong documents saying not always a great deal. Insofar as it has affected Church style, it accounts for much glazing over of eyes as pastoral letters under its influence are read out at Mass," but not NA (96)
  • The roots of the text are in a stand-alone Decree on the Jews, with the inspiration of the Roman Catechism that the fundamental cause of Christ's Death was not Jewish opposition to his claims in first-century Roman Palestine but, rather, the guilt of all sinners of whatever race, in all places and times." (97)
  • Nichols says the regrettable piece they left out of the text from the original draft was a liturgical provisions for a more striking presence in the Roman Liturgy of the saints of Israel. (110)

Chapter 7: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (DV)

  • Vatican I's Dei Filius emphasized faith and reason
  • Curial draft De fontibus revelationis (On the Sources of Revelation) focused on Tradition-Scripture relationship and the inerrancy and historicity of the Bible (114)
    • Controversial reversed vote resulted in personal intervention of Pope John XXIII and moved the document to a Mixed Commission (117), and Paul VI made the draft a priority for the third session (119), and again intervened to delay and push the text back in a more traditional direction (120)
  • Chapter 1: Divine Revelation Itself
    • The aim of revelation is to make men sharers in divine life
    • Divine deeds corroborate the truth of divine words
    • God is the author of the twofold order of revelation in nature and history
  • (Chapters 2, 3, 5 deal with the three hot-button issues of the document: tradition, historicity, and inerrancy)
  • Chapter 2: Transmission of Divine Revelation
    • Two positions on Tradition and Scripture include:
      • Minimizing Position: All truths of revelation are locatable in Scripture in some manner (by reference to Tradition).
      • Maximizing Position: Not all truths of revelation are locatable in Scripture in some manner (there are some divinely revealed truths belonging to the deposit of faith which are only found in Tradition).
      • Both positions regard Tradition as a necessary aid in the reading of Scripture.
      • The Minimizing position is motivated by ecumenism (less offensive to Protestants), but elsewhere the council assumes the Maximizing position.
  • Chapter 3: Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture
    • Penultimate version of the document had the phrase veritas salutaris ("saving truth"), limiting inerrancy to truths of faith and morals pertinent to salvation
    • Final version: "that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures"
    • Nichols commentary on this passage: "The background of this particular change makes it plain that interpreters who find here an affirmation of the partial inerrancy of Scripture are mistaken, though the claim that for Vatican II only biblical texts that bear directly on salvation are deemed inerrant is nonetheless often heard. Taken by itself the text is indeed open to this interpretation. But it is not open to that interpretation when the history of the text is taken into account." (124-125)
    • This affirmation of inerrancy could lead to fundamentalism, so DV also underlines the importance of ascertaining what type of truth claims are involved (understanding author, genre, language, and the wider context of the Bible and Tradition), drawn from Divino Afflante Spiritu.
  • Chapter 4: Old Testament
    • Here the original draft is most intact
  • Chapter 5: New Testament
    • Affirms the apostolic origins and historicity of the Gospels
    • They are not neutral historical accounts, but they do recount the plain and honest truth
  • Chapter 6: Scripture in the Life of the Church
    • Encourage scripture study at all levels, but not in isolation from Tradition (also study the Fathers and Liturgies, "the most important monuments or embodiments in which Tradition is found")
    • Raymond E. Brown took this seriously in his early work, and his two volume commentary on the Gospel of John is "deservedly a modern classic."
    • "But on the whole the creation of a body of Catholic biblical scholarship which integrates with the historical method the study of patristics is one of the unachieved aims of Vatican Council II." (127)

Chapter 8: Declaration on Religious Liberty (DH)

Use for 2024-2025—Aquinas—Alta II Traditional Logic I:

Context (140):

Dignitatis humanae [Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty] is exceptional among conciliar texts in that it has never ceased to attract the criticism that its key assertions are simply incompatible with counterassertions by the earlier Magisterium, and that as a result it has brought the magisterial tradition of the Catholic Church into a condition of internal contradiction—contradiction of a kind that is irresoluble without either the document's withdrawal or at least a further magisterial definition ("clarification") of its terms. Here Dignitatis humanae is obviously comparable with the controversy over Amoris laetitia, the post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, after its promulgation in 2016. There have been at least three attempts to show how the congruence of the declaration with an earlier condition of the Magisterium can be demonstrated.

The second attempt described is this (141-142):

Father Brian Harrison, an Australian member of the priestly fraternity called the Oblates of Wisdom, and for many years a lecturer in the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, took a rather different line in his study Religious Liberty and Contraception. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century popes who taught authoritatively on the matter of religious freedom condemned the proposition that "all peaceful non-Catholic propaganda has a right to immunity from civil prohibition." On the other hand, those same popes did not teach that no peaceful non-Catholic propaganda has a right to immunity from civil prohibition. Hence, they left open a door for the Second Vatican Council to teach that some peaceful non-Catholic propaganda does have a right to immunity from civil prohibition—namely, that kind of propagandistic activity which is compatible with public order, understood as the temporal and spiritual common good. Everything here turns, then, on the distinction between all, none, and some.

Summary

  1. Popes condemned the proposition that "all peaceful non-Catholic propaganda has a right to immunity from civil prohibition."
  2. Same popes did not teach that no peaceful non-Catholic propaganda has a right to immunity from civil prohibition.
  3. Some peaceful non-Catholic propaganda does have a right to immunity from civil prohibition

Summary (simplified)

  1. Not all peaceful propaganda has a right to immunity
  2. Did not say: "no peaceful propaganda has a right to immunity"
  3. Therefore: some peaceful propaganda has a right to immunity

Chapter 9: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (GS)

  • "It's birth was extraordinarily difficult" (157)
  • Didn't directly condemn Marxist-Leninism because of Ostpolitik (157)
  • Some incorrectly conflated GS with the entire council itself as if nothing else occurred (159)

Conclusion

The Second Vatican Council has suffered from its press. That includes not only vulgarized mediatic presentations of its meaning but also the more sophisticated, and indeed the highly sophisticated—or even oversophiscated—effusions of its admirers. For among its admirers it is often a chimerical council and not the actual council of the texts.

The real council was more theologically rooted in previous ages of the Church. It was a council where the conciliar minority—guarded, prudent, and concerned for explicit continuity at all points with the preceding tradition—played a beneficial role in steadying the conciliar majority— enthused by the movements of biblical, patristic, and liturgical resourcement and a desire to reach out to the world of the (then) present day in generosity of heart. The texts that emerged from this often-impassioned debate would remain susceptible to a reading of a classically Christian kind.

If this small book has given readers that impression, it will have achieved its goal.

Topic: Vatican II

Created: 2024-09-13-Fri
Updated: 2025-01-14-Tue