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Joe answers some objections to Vatican II raised by the SSPX.
Transcript:
Joe :
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and in response to my recent video about the SSPX consecrations, I mentioned that despite what you may have heard, the dispute between the Vatican and the Society of St. Pius X not a dispute about the Latin mass. It is about whether or not Vatican II teaches error. As I put it last time, they accused the Council of Teaching error or heresy on three issues, religious liberty, accumanism, and collegiality. There simply is not time right now to do a deep dive on those charges. Let me know in the comments and I can do a more thorough examination of those allegations. Since then, four things happened. First, you all overwhelmingly said that you would like that. Nicholas Willie’s comment asking me to do the episode was upvoted more than 500 times and I’ve had people reach out to me directly to ask me to do the episode.
Second, the SSPX put out a statement insisting that they are neither schismatic nor disobedient. Their reasoning is that they obey the Holy Sea in all matters where there is neither certainty nor probability of modernism. And they say that they are ready to obey the Pope in all things provided that his orders do not imply adherence to the modernist doctrines of Vatican II and the post-conciliar period. So very clearly, even from that response, getting to the bottom of whether or not Vatican II actually taught modernist doctrines is vitally important. Third, Father Ian Palko of the SSPX also reached out to me. Now he agreed with me the dispute is theological and doctrinal rather than liturgical. He also stressed that the society’s position is not that Vatican II taught heresy technically since the council doesn’t reject any explicitly defined dogma. The society’s position is rather that it teaches error, teaches things that are false, even if they’re not explicitly formally condemned.
Having said that, he also disagreed with some of the ways that I’d characterized the SSPX position in my prior video and he said, “I wish you’d reached out to ask about some of these points as I would’ve been happy to critique or correct your presentation of our position or arguments. And I know you put a premium on steel manning an opponent, not straw manning.” Now for context there, we actually know each other in real life. We met recently on a flight to Dallas. We hit it off right away. He’s actually come over to dinner with us. He lives here in Kansas City. He used to work for Boulevard Brewery fittingly. And I would say correctly, he likes their old drinks better than their new ones. I would say this, St. Augustine once said of the Donates Bishop Emeritus of Zazarea, that accepting only his adherence to schismatics, he’s a good and well-educated man.
Now I’m not sure if emeritus took Augustine’s words as a compliment, but I hope Father Palko will. All of that is to say, I actually had considered reaching out to him earlier to review the episode, but I knew he was out of town for the consecrations. So the fourth and final thing is that as I was writing this episode, I realized that the episode I was working on risked being incomplete and misleading because of this. As Catholics, we should strive to interpret the words of others in a charitable way. And we have an even greater duty to do that when we’re talking about the words of the vicar of Christ or Nechamenical counsel. We should be receiving those words with the spirit of docility rather than a spirit of cynicism and skepticism. But there is a legitimate difference between charitable docility on the one hand and a kind of Pollyannish whitewashing on the other.
It is no service to the church. It is no service to the truth for Catholics to act as if everything is okay when there are real problems in the church. So cards on the table. I don’t think that the council taught error or heresy on religious liberty, acumenism or collegiality, but I do think that there are fair criticisms that can be made of Vatican II. And I don’t want to give a lopsided impresion by only saying half of that. So here’s what I’ve decided to do. Today I’m going to do two things. First, I’m going to look at four criticisms of the second Vatican Council in its aftermath that I think are fair game. And then I’m going to show why I think none of those reasons are sufficient to reject Vatican II itself. Then next week I’m going to address the specific criticism that these society have raised, religious liberty, acumenism, collegiality.
And this way as well, Father Palko and I will both have time to correspond to make sure that we’re not speaking past one another, that I’m accurately getting the society’s position and responding to it. Now speaking of Father Palko, and I’m genuinely not making this up, in one of his emails, he asked me to mention to you that he is a patron of this channel and that he says, “Even those accused of being schizomatic think you should support Joe over at shamosjoe.com.” So I’m honored by his support and I’m honored by the support of all of you who support this channel through prayers and donations, even when we sometimes disagree. So with that said, what are the four criticisms of Vatican II that I think are legitimate? The first criticism. Certain passages in council documents are legitimately ambiguous. The mere fact that you sometimes have multiple groups of brilliant and well-meaning theologians striving for orthodoxy who can’t agree on what it is that the document is teaching in a particular context strikes me as sufficient evidence, almost self-evident evidence that the documents themselves are not always entirely perspicuous.
The second critique. Some of the council fathers may have even wanted this ambiguity. Now the SSBX has argued that the second Vatican council has what it calls time bombs in it. These innocent seeming passages or ambiguous sun passages that then explode later on. As Father Palko explains, the documents are intentionally ambiguous and intended as time bombs, which at the council were presented as Orthodox or at least could have a compatible reading, but later could be used to also support a novel interpretation. Now those kind of accusations often turn on a lot of hearsay that’s hard to prove. It’s this person heard somebody say something really scandalous in Rome one time at the council, and it’s often very hard to run to ground what’s true and what’s just rumor and gossip. But the fact remains there were a lot of theologians at Vatican II who wanted something much more radical than what we see in the council texts themselves who frequently wanted something frankly heretical.
Since they couldn’t get overt repudiation of church teaching, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that many of them tried to at least get language that was vague enough to leave room for their preferred heresy. The third critique, many of the reforms of the council were disastrously implemented. Whether we’re talking about the liturgical changes or the difference in how Catholics approached theology and even apologetics in the period after the council, it’s not hard to make the case that A, there were huge changes. B, many of these changes seem to have actually hurt the church leading to a situation which huge numbers of Catholics have left the church and many of those who’ve remained do so as lukewarm Catholics with little interest or knowledge of the faith, often themselves openly holding beliefs to church regards as heretical. But I think it’s worth saying a couple things here. On the one hand, post-hawk, ergo, proctor, hawk is a logical fallacy.
The mere fact that X happened after Y does not mean that X happened because of Y. Sure, Catholics in the ’70s and ’80s were markedly worse than Catholics in the ’40s and ’50s. But on the other hand, Christians in general were markedly worse in the ’70s and ’80s than they were in the ’40s and ’50s. The Second Vatican Council took place amid huge cultural and sexual revolutions. So it’s not reasonable to place all of the blame for everything we see in the late 20th century compared to the early 20th century at the feet of the second Vatican Council. On the other hand though, I think it would be equally unreasonable to try to make sense of the painful second half of the 20th century and really this period we’re only beginning to emerge from now without looking at just how badly the second Vatican council was implemented in parishes around the world.
And if that’s the case, I think it’s perfectly reasonable as well to ask, well, how much of that would’ve happened without the council? How much of that can be put at the feet of the council? The fourth and final critique that I think is fair game, liturgically it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the traditional Latin mass does a better job of expressing the sacrificial nature of the mass. Certainly the text of the Eucharist prayers do it more explicitly and more frequently in their descriptions of the mass as a representation of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So as I say, I think all four of those critiques are actually fair game. I think they’re reasonable. I think they’re all probably true. But if that’s the case, why are those collectively not sufficient reasons to reject Vatican II? I want to take each one of them one at a time and apply them through the lens of church history.
Let’s start with the first objection. This idea that some of the teachings at Vatican II are ambiguous on specific points. That seems to be true of Vatican II, but I think it also seems to be true of seemingly every council. And in fact, we could go even further. Our Lord’s own words are regularly twisted and misunderstood by heretics and even just by ignorant people trying to learn about him. How many times have you heard people distort either intentionally or accidentally teachings like the Father is greater than I or call no man father? St. Peter says of the divinely inspired epistles of St. Paul that there are some things in them hard to understand, which he warns that the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. To be sure, it is frustrating to see divine teaching distorted or misunderstood, but the fact that a teaching is misunderstood or distorted is not a disproof of the teaching being true or being divine teaching.
So with that said, let’s turn to the second objection. Sometimes we find ecumenical councils that were ambiguous and in which the heretics present seemingly wanted that ambiguity to allow them to promote false teachings. That’s part of the narrative we often hear about Vatican II, and that might be right, but it’s also true at the First Council of Nicaea. Today we remember fondly the First Council of Nicaea for its clarity and its precision in expressing the nature of Jesus’s relationship to the Father. But back in the fourth century, there were Aryan heretics who signed the Nicean Creed and bishops who opposed the creed for fear that it taught the heresies of semi-modalism, motonism, or sibellianism. So let me back up a little bit. The major theological crisis facing the church at the time the first Council of Nicaea is called in 325 is a heresy of Aryanism, which taught that Jesus was a creature, not the coeternal God with the Father.
And the First Council of Nicaea was a key opportunity for Orthodox believing bishops to finally defeat their heretical Aryan opponents. But it didn’t really work out that way, or at least it didn’t work out that way completely. Harold Drake in the Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea recounts how actually many of the strongest opponents of the Aryan heresy left Nicaea disappointed. Sure, the Nicean Creed agreed with them, but they’d wanted more. They entered the council with overwhelming numbers on their side and they wanted to actually just crush the Aryan heretics. But the council instead ended up taking this kind of path of reconciliation, allowing the heretical bishops to sort of wiggle off the hook. All but a few of the heretical bishops even signed the Niceean Creed, which they then went home and reinterpreted in a heretical way. And it was clear throughout the council that this was the best realistic outcome that the Aryan side could hope for.
They weren’t going to convince the church that Jesus was just a creature. So instead they listened for language that they found ambiguous enough that they knew they could exploit. Early on, St. Anthonatius described how at the council, the fathers wanted to declare that the son was like the Father exactly as the Father in all things and immutable and always in the Father. And all of those expressions are good and true, but they realized that the Aryans were winking and muttering to each other because they realized that they could find instances in scripture in which that same kind of language used to describe mere creatures. So ultimately the council settles on the technical term consubstantial, homouseos. And they choose this term precisely because it’s precise and obviously anti-Aryan. But even here, Yusebius of Nikomedia, one of the most influential promoters of the Aryan heresy, he’s one of the ones who signs the Nysean creed.
He then goes home and he writes a letter to his flock explaining why. As Richard Hansen points out in reading his letter, one would hardly believe that the Nicean creed was designedly anti-Aryan. Did one not have the creed before one’s eyes. Over and over again, Yusebius reinterprets the meaning of the creed in these implausible ways. In Hansen’s words, what Yusebius needed was a good deal of disingenuousness without the necessity of direct mendacity. Now, Father Palko argues that comparing the ambiguities and confusions and disputes in the aftermath of First Nycea is a false analogy in applying it to Vatican II. In his words, Vatican II is difficult to implement clearly because of ambiguity and a continual need to reinterpret. On the other hand, Trent and Nycea were difficult to implement because they were so clear and so resisted by many who did not want them to be implemented or objected to the doctrines clearly taught.
And I’d say two things to this. First, it’s true there were disingenuous actors like Yusebius, but there were also plenty of disingenuous actors at Vatican II. Many of the things promoted in the name of the spirit of Vatican II were oftentimes just the heretical agendas of people not wanting what the council actually said. In both cases, those implausible interpretations of the council fly in the face of what the council clearly actually taught. But second, after both Nicaea and Vatican II, there’s a different kind of controversy. Orthodox Catholics who are troubled that the council is somehow taught error. Remember I said earlier, the council settled on this technical term, homo usios or consubstantial, to clearly distinguish Catholic Orthodoxy from Aryanism. Well, it turns out this actually created some theological confusion of its own. As Theo Engage points out in his video in the aftermath of the Council of Nicia, the East quickly found itself split not into two factions anymore, but now into three.
CLIP:
The council was by no means conclusive as it did not put an end to the controversy. The churches of the East were divided among themselves as some were Aryans. Some adhered fully to the Niceean faith and others adhered to the Niceean faith, but could not accept the theological formulation of Homo Oseos or the consubstantiality of the Father with the Son. That is the Father and the Son share the same substance or essence.
Joe :
So we’ve already seen the Aryan heretics. They either opposed the Nician Creed directly and openly or else they tried to reinterpret it disingenuously. But what’s going on there in Antioch and in the broader Middle East? There we find bishops who agreed with the theology of the Creed, but they disagreed with the language of the Creed. Now, part of the issue here is that the Greek Usea actually has kind of a range of meaning. So the Niceean Creed could be saying that Jesus is of the same divine being as the father, or it could be saying that Jesus was the same person as the father. One of those is true and one of those is heretical. The easiest way to understand it, I think, think about the clip I just played. The graphic that they use says Homousia, son equals father. Well, that could mean and probably means in context that the son is equal to the father, but son equals father could also mean that the son and father are literally the same person.
One of those is Orthodox. The other one is the heresy of modalism. Now making matters worse, the bishop in the Antiochean region had previously condemned a heretic named Paul of Samasota. Now, unfortunately, we don’t actually know exactly what his beliefs were. It was too early on. They’re kind of lost to history, but he seems to have been some kind of what’s called adoptionist. And that means he thought Jesus was a man who became the Son of God. Whatever the case was, his teachings were condemned, including his teaching that Jesus was homouseus with the Father. So you can see why the Antiochian bishops had trouble with Nicaea. Not only was Nicean Creek capable of being misread in this heretical modalist way, it used the exact language that they had just condemned of Paul of Samasota. Now most likely the two different groups were using the same word, but in radically different ways, but that’s kind of the point.
Even a council as venerable as first Nicaea can’t escape the charge that his language is sometimes ambiguous or capable of being misread or misunderstood in erroneous and even heretical ways. Took decades for this to get fully sorted out in the church after the death of St. Anthonatius. The post-conciliary chaos was still so severe in St. Pasil’s of Great’s Day that he compared it to a nighttime naval battle in which thick darkness falls from the clouds and blackens all the scenes so that watch words are indistinguishable in the confusion and all distinction between friend and foe is lost. He described how what had begun as a clear batt between Catholicism on one side and Aronism on the other had descended into confusion. “The war was split up in more ways than I can tell into many subdivisions so that all men were stirred to a state of inviterate hatred like by common party spirit and individual suspicion.
But what storm at sea was ever so fierce and wild as this tempest of the churches. In it, every landmark of the fathers has been moved. Every foundation, every bulwark of opinion has been shaken. Everything buoyed up on the unsound is dashed about and shaken down. We attack one another. We are overthrown by one another. If our enemy is not the first to strike us, we are wounded by the comrade at our side.” And his famous Christmas address of 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI distinguished the hermeneutic of reform from the Hermeneutic of Rupture, he began by comparing the state of the church following Vatican II to the state of the church described here by Basil. And I think you can see why. But the good news for Basil then and for us now is that the truth won out in the midst of that confusion.
It just took time. Despite the way the council was both innocently and maliciously misinterpreted at first, its proper interpretation is what’s endured. And that’s what stood the test of the ages. Okay. So what about the third critique? That many of the reforms of the council were disastrously implemented. The mere fact that something is called for by a Pope or called for by a council simply doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed in the short or the long term. Pope innocent III, one of the greatest popes in history, called the fourth crusade to reclaim Jerusalem. But as Dr. Steven Madden points out, the fourth crusade was launched at the height of the crusading movement and yet it proceeded to go terribly wrong. Organized to restore Jerusalem to Christian control, the fourth crusade conquered and looted the greatest Christian city in the world by sacking the city of Constantinople in 12:04.
Some 800 years later, this event continues to harm Catholic Orthodox unity even though it was done against the express wishes and even instructions of Pope innocent. As Madden points out, the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens greeted Pope John Paul II in 2001 by complaining about the fourth crusade. In other words, it is possible to believe that a council is lawful, valid and Orthodox and also that the things that it’s proposing might not actually work out well in the real world. They might even go disastrously awry. And it’s worth adding to this what anyone who’s ever been part of a major move or change probably already knows. In the short term, major upheavals usually hurt. They seem to cause more damage than good. It’s hard to imagine that somebody looking at the Naval Battle of Basil’s Day would think that the implementation of Nycea had gone swimmingly, for example.
Part of this is just that change takes time. We need patience. But part of this also is that the implementation of a council relies on human effort and we can thwart good plans with our actions or our inactions. The fourth lettering council back in 1215 called for a fifth crusade after the failure of the fourth, once again atempting to recover the Holy Land. This time it failed for a different reason, largely because the emperor Friedrich II promised to help, but then he and his army simply didn’t show up. Now Friedrich was ultimately excommunicated partly for oath breaking.That was the first of four times he was excommunicated. But the fact that a council had called this crusade neither ensured its success or ensured that the men left to implement it would do it in a wise or holy way or would do so faithfully at all.
And I would say simply that what’s true of a crusade called in the name of the church can likewise be true of a liturgical reform called in the name of the church. Sacrosanctum Conchillium, the second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy was approved overwhelmingly. Literally the vote was 2,147 in favor to four against. But when you get into the brass tacks, the actual implementation of the Novus Orto was much more controversial right from the start. So I think it might be helpful to think about that in the context of the fourth and final objection. Cardinals Ataviani and Bachi, who’d supported Vatican II’s called for the liturgical reform, who had signed the document, were nevertheless troubled with the actual implementation of it. They were troubled originally by an early draft of what we now know as the Novus Orto. And they were worried precisely because they feared it didn’t clearly enough depict the sacrificial nature of the mass.
So the two of them helped put in front of Pope Paul VI, what is sometimes called Otaviani’s intervention. Now after that intervention, Otaviani actually expressed his relief when Pope St. Paul the VI gave two weekly audiences exploring the sacrificial nature of the mass and stressing that this theology remains true in the new ordo as well as the old. In Otaviani’s words, he rejoiced profoundly after reading the text and concluded that at that point, no one can any longer be genuinely scandalized. But I think that for many Catholics, the concerns not actually that the counselor or the Pope themselves were unclear on this point. After all, if you take the trouble to actually read the document, Saccharosanco can show him is quite explicit that the mass is a perpetuation of the sacrifice of the cross. Pope St. Paul VI propounds on this theology at great length and his encyclical in the subject, Mysterium Fide.
But I think the concern is rather that the mass itself isn’t clear enough that it is to be understood as a sacrifice. Now in weighing this objection, my own thinking something like this, it’s not true that that theology is absent from the Novosordo. It’s actually clearly present in the Eucharistic prayers, which in treat the father to accept this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim, the holy bread of eternal life and the child’s of everlasting salvation. But it is true that the theology is more emphasized than the TLM. So how do we consider that? How do we weigh that? I think it’s worth bearing a couple points in mind. First, there’s a threefold signification to the mass. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, the mass points backwards to the cross. So we call it the sacrifice of the mass. In the present, it is what gathers us together in Christ.
So we call it communion. And it points forward to the future for full culmination of communion with God in heaven. So we call it Viaticum or Eucharist. So we’re trying to express a lot in the prayers and in the rituals in the Eucharistic liturgy. But the second thing to bear in mind is that the Roman rite is just one of the expressions of that Eucharistic liturgy, just one of the ways we’ve historically done this as Christians. As Father Adrian Fortescue points out, from about the fourth century onwards, the old fluid uniform rite crystallized into different liturgies in different places. And so broadly speaking, we’re left with seven different liturgical traditions, the Latin rite, which many of us are familiar with, but also the Byzantine, the Alexandrian or Coptic, the Syriac, the Armenian, the Marionite, and the Chaldean rites. And as Fortescue points out, these different rites evolved, all expressing the same basic truths about the Eucharist liturgy, but all speaking in their own voice in somewhat different ways with somewhat different prayers.
He compares it to the evolution of different languages. So if you imagine, for example, the various romance languages evolving from a common Latin parent and then developing into languages of their own. And just like with a language, you might find that one language does a better job of expressing one subject. It’s a little more precise to talk about love and Greek or whatever. Well, similarly, when we’re talking about the different expressions of the Eucharistic liturgy, we might find something similar as well. Perhaps you find the traditional Latin mass does the best job at capturing the mass as sacrifice. Perhaps you find the Nova Sorto does the best job of capturing the mass as communion with Christ and with the church. Perhaps you find that some of the Eastern liturgies do the best job at capturing that we are anticipating the heavenly liturgy. But whatever the case, so long as every version of the Eucharistic liturgy, every expression of each of these rights does express all three of those dimensions, then I think what we’re dealing with isn’t contradictions or errors.
I think we’re dealing just with different emphases. So I think it’s fine to think the mass should emphasize one of those dimensions more than it does or more clearly than it does. But I don’t think you can go from that to saying, well, therefore the mass itself is sacrilegious or deficient in such a way that we should reject it. So where does that leave us? I think that there were some legitimate ambiguities in Vatican II. I think those ambiguities were capable of being understood in an Orthodox way and that they should be, but they’re also clearly capable of being misunderstood innocently or maliciously. I think that there were people who weaponized those ambiguities in favor of their preferred heretical agendas. And I think on many levels, what we saw in the aftermath of the council was an era of confusion and chaos that did great damage to a lot of innocent souls.
But I don’t think that those things are unique to justice council. Unfortunately, in many ways, they seem to be almost inherent difficulties with ecumenical councils. And I don’t think that any of those together or separately are good reasons to resist or reject the teaching of Vatican II. Now, that still leaves us with three elephants in the room. What do we do with the alleged errors of Vatican II on religious liberty, on accumanism and on collegiality? God willing. I’m going to explore that next week. Until then, if you want a deeper dive on Eucharistic theology, exploring the Eucharist is strange, sacrificial, serious, sacramental and shocking. I hope you’ll check out this video right here. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you. I