The First Vatican Council.There have been a number of other Councils of the Church
which form and bind our Catholic life.
"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" - Fr Hunwicke.
A refreshing breath of honesty and downright sensibleness from Dom. Mark Daniel Kirby at Vultus Christi. He writes to suggest that we put the Second Vatican Council in its proper place - which is to recognise that every other council has the same weight and we forget that at our peril - although Vatican II unlike every other council in the history of the Church did not define any doctrines to be believed or pronounce any anathemas on what is not to be believed.
He is spurred into writing by the irrepressible Fr Hunwicke, whose church in Oxford, St Thomas the Martyr, I visited for the first time last year. Fr Hunwicke's church and he himself seem Catholic in all but name and while a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I do hope that he is going to become a rose that is known by its proper name and join the Ordinariate.
Here is some of Dom Mark's post:
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 make 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:
Are you saying that there have been other Councils of the Church besides VATICAN II? (On reflection, if we have a Vatican II then I suppose there must have been a Vatican I at some time or other). Why has this news not been broadcast far and wide? I suppose these other councils could not have been of any great importance or else we would have been told about them in our schools, churches and seminaries, especially our seminaries. Anyway, let's not worry about previous trivialities when we have VATICAN II as our new Bible.
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