Father Hunwicke on Vatican II

From the essential Vultus Christi blog is this latest addition. It's certainly provocative.

http://vultus.stblogs.org/2011/03/brilliant-father-hunwicke.html

It looks like the page has been pulled.

That's a pity, it was an interesting commentary. I really liked the phrase "silly optimisms"... it was a fitting description.

Here it is again through the power of Google:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xYdVb7ChTRoJ:vultus.stblogs.org/2011/03/brilliant-father-hunwicke.html+brilliant+fr+hunwicke+vultus+christi&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

Maybe we Have taken Vat II a little too seriously.
But then again, It Was responsible for changing the Mass.

Brilliant, Father Hunwicke
By
Father Mark
on March 17, 2011 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fr+Hunwicke+7.JPG

Basta

I have, for some time, been convinced that we would do well to give the documents of the Second Vatican Council an honourable place in the subterranean archives of Church history, and let them rest there to be discovered by generations to come. Fifty years of squabbling over them makes me want to cry, Basta! The Church is wider, deeper, higher, and immeasurably richer than what happened from 1962 to 1965.

Aging prelates still litter their discourses with the obligatory reverential references to Vatican II, delusionally convinced that the mere mention of "The Council" has a magical quality. It's all so wearisome. One sometimes has the impression that there is little else in their libraries, that there was nothing before "The Council," and that they have read nothing since.

You can imagine my delight when so bright a luminary as Father Hunwicke expressed with characteristic insight and wit what I have been thinking, but haven't dared to express. Enough of me, then. Read Father Hunwicke:

Vatican II was a validly convoked Ecumenical Council, a Sacrosanctum Concilium of the Whole Church. If it had chosen to do so, it could have defined dogmas de fide to which any and every Catholic would have been obliged to give the complete assent of Divine Faith. Laws, canons, which it enacted ... if it did ... bind the faithful for a long as they remain unrepealed by lawful authority or, through desuetude, cease to bind. Its pronouncements command respect, religiosum obsequium, just as those enacted by the Council of Vienne in 1311, did in 1361 and, for that matter ... I presume ... still do.

All this is compatible with certain other propositions. For example: that it would have been better unconvoked; that it did no good; that it encouraged, unwittingly, heterodox tendencies which have had a baleful effect upon the Church ever since. I do not wish, in this piece, to advance, attack, or defend, any of those propositions. The proposition which I now have in mind is a little different: that Vatican II is History; that its relevance is Not For Our Time, fifty years later, any more than its relevance was for fifty years previously. Vatican II itself claimed to speak to the World of its own time: fair enough; that time was not our time, is not our time.

Vatican II, like so many of its predecessor councils, is obsolete or, at the very least, obsolescent. It did not foresee the major problems of our age and, therefore, did not give us guidance for getting through them. Its silly optimisms are no more relevant to our very different, much harsher, age than is the proccupation of medieval councils with just-one-more-crusade. The notion that it was some sort of super-council which displaced and replaced the councils which preceded it is, in my view, a heresy: because it disregards councils which did, dogmatically, bind, in favour of a council which did not even claim to bind. Worse even than heresy, it is historical twaddle.

Emphasis on Vatican II has a number of unfortunate side-effects. It means that other, worthier, councils are ignored; and, in saying this I am not only thinking of Trent ... and not even of the Synod of Bethlehem. I wonder if you remember the striking ... mind-blowing ... assertion of Cardinal Ratzinger that the West needs to receive the "fundamental lines of the theology" of the Council of Moskow in 1551. And I am far from sure that the Latin Church would come to much harm if it humbly, prayerfully, set itself to assess the teachings of the 'Palamite' councils of the fourteenth century as they bear on the central Christian mystery of theosis.

And the fetichising of Vatican II distracts attention from the real and significant and valuable actions of the Roman Magisterium, which deserve so very much better than the sneers directed at them by illiterate fools. Humanae vitae and Ordinatio sacerdotalis, slender volumes, are worth more than all the paper wasted at Vatican II. Documents of the CDF, keeping up with the errors proposed in areas of ethics by the World's agenda, represent the locus to which perplexed modern Catholics should turn for teaching and guidance.

Byzantine Christians have an elegant custom of keeping, a few days after a major festival, a Leave Taking of that feast. I rather think that 2012 would be a good year for an official Leave Taking of Vatican II (with either a solemn EF Requiem or a patriarchal concelebration of the Liturgy of S John Chrysostom - propers as on Orthodoxy Sunday - in S Peter's?). In practical terms, it is high time that we all stopped seeking help in the yellowing pages of Abbot's not-particularly-good translation of its documents. It is in this context that I view the dialogue between the Vatican and SSPX. I wish it well, very well. But it is really a little bit like the old ARCIC dialogues between Rome and Anglicans ... painstakingly and painfully going over the old controversies of a moribund past in purblind ignorance of the actual problems in the world outside the seminar-room windows. It is all thoroughly worthy and admirable; it is even quite fun to contemplate their lengthy verbal convolutions; for the people who like this sort of thing, this is precisely the sort of thing that they like. But it is of rapidly diminishing relevance to anything real.

If I had any influence with either the Roman dikasteries, or the SSPX, which I don't, I would advise both sides to stop taking this whole business so painfully seriously; to give each other a broad wink across the negotiating table; to drink deep together in whatever beverages the dikasteries keep in their cellars; and to sign up to some cheerful little semantic fudge which would enable the Holy See to get on with the urgent and joyful task of erecting SSPX Ordinariates all over the world. Droves of them. Ordinariates is the Future. Fresh Expressions of Church.

Cardinal Ratzinger that the West needs to receive the "fundamental lines of the theology" of the Council of Moskow in 1551. And I am far from sure that the Latin Church would come to much harm if it humbly, prayerfully, set itself to assess the teachings of the 'Palamite' councils of the fourteenth century as they bear on the central Christian mystery of theosis.

Is he saying that heterodox councils have something to contribute? This is weird.

RashaLampa wrote:

Cardinal Ratzinger that the West needs to receive the "fundamental lines of the theology" of the Council of Moskow in 1551. And I am far from sure that the Latin Church would come to much harm if it humbly, prayerfully, set itself to assess the teachings of the 'Palamite' councils of the fourteenth century as they bear on the central Christian mystery of theosis.

Is he saying that heterodox councils have something to contribute? This is weird.

I can't keep up with all the weird Fr./Cardinal/private theologian/professor Ratzinger quotes. I really can't. How representative is Fr. Hunwicke's thought of other Anglican Ordinariate priests, I wonder? He says some good things, but also muddies the water with occasional Fresh Expressions of Ambiguity like what you quoted here.