Monday, August 25, 2014

Original Documents of Vatican II

The Rad Trad generally avoids discussing the can of worms that dominates the trad-o-sphere, the Second Vatican Council. Rorate Caeli seems to publish something every week on the destruction "since Vatican II," as though that Council was the starting point and not the end point of the revolution. Still, once in a while some reflection on Vatican II is useful. Here is a link to some of the documents created by Pope John's commission, which included archbishops Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan and Marcel Lefebvre of Dakar, who butted their heads even then. The document on Christian Order has interesting footnoting, quoting Pius XII's radio addresses as magisterium over a dozen times! The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church is a good document, even though the last sentence chapter 1, section 7 is a load of bollocks. The Council Fathers scrapped all these documents during the first session. Pope John died in 1963 and Montini replaced him. Suddenly, new and very verbose documents appeared from small commissions which were not supposed to have been meeting, suggesting that the study groups had been meeting "off the clock" for a considerable time. Only Msgr. Annibale Bugnini's very own Sacrosanctum Concilium survived the Council Fathers and indeed became the first document passed; it was supposedly written with the other schemas, but its removal from the work of the general commission suggests, at least to me, that it may have been written when the initial study groups for an Ecumenical Council began to meet late during the pontificate of Pius XII. 

Read and learn! Do not let silly bloggers, myself included, distract you from primary information sources.

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