The Second Vatican Council must be discussed, says the Vaticanist Americo Mascarucci.
(Rome) Much attention is being paid to the debate on a revision of the Second Vatican Council, which was started by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano. It moves Catholics who take their faith seriously and live and suffer with their Church. The journalist and Vaticanist Americo Mascarucci, author of two books on the pontificate of Pope Francis, also speaks. In 2018, "The Revolution of Pope Francis was published. How the Church transforms from Don Milani to Luther"[1] and in 2019 a book on the changes in the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) "The Church in Politics. How the CEI has changed from Ruini to Pope Francis"[2] Marco Tosatti has published the statement of his colleague on the proposal of Archbishop Vigano.
After a short introduction, "I am not a theologian", but "a simple journalist who is passionate about Vatican affairs," Mascarucci comes straight to the point.
"The historian Roberto De Mattei refuted in his book "The Second Vatican Council: A Hitherto Untold History" the thesis of the hermeneutics of continuity, which both Wojtyla and Ratzinger were so concerned with, and proved that it is impossible to separate the Council from the errors that followed it. (...) Today, De Mattei's thesis seems to be taking shape in the face of certain behaviours typical of the current pontificate, precisely where the Council becomes the cover for certain, at least questionable, positions to be reclaimed."
Pope Francis was "perhaps the best example of how the Second Vaticanum, far from renewing itself in the sign of continuity, was rather the event that put an end to the Catholic Church as the only Church of Christ in apostolic continuity, the one and only Church in which salvation lies."
According to Mascarucci, the theologian and philosopher Karl Rahner's thesis, "a great supporter of the Council as a break with tradition," according to which it is not belonging to the Church that guarantees salvation, but that the just conscience, which is oriented towards good, brings people closer to God, even if they do not believe in him (the theory of the 'anonymous Christian'), "seems to be the guiding star today, on which the current Pope orients himself."
"It is no coincidence that he is applauded and praised more by atheists than by practicing Catholics, and that he has never made a secret of having a greater affinity for certain infidels like Eugenio Scalfari than with the so-called traditionalist Catholics."
Thus, if it is not possible to separate the errors from the Council, "then it is not possible to believe that the schism of Isolotto, which developed in "Catho-Communist Florence," which gathered around the ideas of Giorgio La Pira, was the result of a false interpretation of the Counciliar spirit".
This entreaty requires a little excursion.
The schism of Isolotto
The schism of isolotto from 1968 refers to the one between the pastor of the Florentine district of Isolotto, Don Enzo Mazzi, and his archbishop. Don Mazzi, a "worker priest" who seemed to have more in common with Communists and Socialists than with the Christian Democrats, followed his own course. He justified this with the aim of "overcoming the dividing lines between believers and unbelievers, between good and bad, between priests and laymen, between the sacramental and the profane, between the parties." He made changes to the liturgy by introducing the vernacular and celebrating Mass facing the people. He was supported by Giorgio La Pira, then the mayor of Florence on the left.
Don Mazzi demonstrated against the Americans in Vietnam, showed solidarity with blacks in the United States, and supported a group of students from the Catholic University of Milan, which occupied Parma cathedral in September 1968 as part of the student protests. While Pope Paul VI condemned the action, Don Mazzi showed solidarity with the students. When Don Mazzi held a "basic democratic" meeting of his parish, even though his archbishop had forbidden it, he deposed him as a pastor.
Don Mazzi did not, however, depart, but founded a "base community" in the District of Isolotto as a substitute for the deprived parish, which became the model of the base communities in Europe. That was the schism. In 1974 he was suspended a divinis and was no longer allowed to exercise his priesthood. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred back to the layman. Although the basic community was not recognized by the Church, it was visited by like-minded priests from all over the world who celebrated there.
Mazzi himself became a permanent columnist for the left-leaning daily La Repubblica by Eugenio Scalfari and the Communist daily Il Manifesto. His last book, "The Value of Heresy"[3], was published there in 2010. Mazzi died in 2011 at the age of 84. According to his final request, his body was burned.
So we return to Mascarucci's remarks.
Therefore, the commitment of many Catholics to the side of the Communist Party or the support of divorce in the referendum by well-known priests and theologians was not the result of a "false interpretation" of the Council. Nor was it due to a "misinterpretation" that Giacomo Cardinal Lercaro, Archbishop of Bologna from 1952 to 1968 and one of the four Council moderators, "in the middle of the Cold War, delivered his famous sermon against the Vietnam War and American imperialism, while the Communists drowned the uprisings in the countries of Eastern Europe in blood and tortured priests and religious."
The Second Vaticanum was manipulated by outright sabotage
Archbishop Vigano had rightly pointed it out:
"The Second Vatican Council was in fact manipulated by veritable acts of sabotage, which, inside and outside, saw proper centers of conspiracy at work. Among these, an organization called Opus Angeli deserves attention, whose main initiators were the ultra-progressive Belgian Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens and the Brazilian Bishop Helder Camara, one of the most important representatives of the liberation theologyoften praised by Francis."
They tried "with the support of powerful media they attempted to influence the work of the Council and, above all, its final result.
"Although they failed, that the Council should approve their civil rights agenda, the abolition of priestly celibacy, the opening up to the priesthood of women and the change in sexual morality by allowing the laity to use artificial contraceptives for birth control by colusion with the state, they were very adept at clouding the clear water, confusing the contents and contaminating the texts, so that a free and ambiguous interpretation of the council documents and the doctrine of faith was opened to a modernist key, which became the basis for the errors following the Council.'Pope John Paul II recognized many of the wrong developments and made an active, sometimes courageous, effort to put the Council on the right path in its perception and effect. He was tirelessly supported by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, his Prefect of Doctrine and the Faith.
"But he too was misled on some issues that abounded, perhaps because he was the first foreign pope in the midst of a Vatican curia still wholly controlled by Italians, the heirs of the Montini era, who themselves were often associated with the Council period and its errors."In other words, Mascarucci says, the hard line taken against Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the great critic of the Council, and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X, which he founded, cannot be explained. A line vigorously defended by Cardinal Secretary of State Agostino Casaroli (1914–1998) and his spiritual son Achille Cardinal Silvestrini (1923–2019), even after the death of Paul VI, as well as both influential defenders of the Eastern Policy and its rapprochement of the Church with the Soviet Union and the Communist Eastern Bloc.
"Archbishop Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988, as demanded by the most left-wing sectors of the Roman Curia, although Cardinal Ratzinger had spoken out against it."However, according to the above-mentioned sectors, the French archbishop had to be punished precisely because "he denounced with the greatest determination the lack of continuity of the Second Vatican Council".
John Paul II could not completely contain the "Spirit of Assisi" and other excesses, "as even his friend and great admirer Vittorio Messori repeatedly lamented."
"Messori noted the unacceptable episode of the World Day of Peace,which took place on 27 May. On October 1, 1986, in Assisi, in the presence of representatives of all world religions, pagan rites took place in the Basilica of St. Francis, chickens were slaughtered on the altar of the Basilica of St. Clare, esoteric dances and other, denounced excesses that had themselves escaped the attention of Cardinal Ratzinger, who had intervened vigorously in the days before to prevent other questionable and sacrilegious initiatives."
The German influence on the Church
Mascarucci concludes from the development:
"All this has laid the foundation for this ecumenism, which, far from promoting a relationship of mutual respect between the different faiths in the spirit of dialogue, has led to the legitimisation of the idea of a universal church, the one and the same God for all, for a person who is almost entirely free to choose the Church that best suits his preferences, because it is sufficient to believe in the true God in order to find salvation independently of baptism.
An idea that, in the years since the end of the Ratzinger era, which was marked by Benedict XVI's attempt to counter the projects of the German episcopate, based on ideas of the theologian Hans Küng to accelerate the break with tradition, by affirming the hermeneutics of continuity, especially in the ethical questions and independence of the national Episcopal Conferences from Rome. Under Bergoglio, these projects fall on fertile ground thanks to the influence exerted on the current Pope by the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, the keynote speaker for the Family Synod and the openings to remarried divorcees, dissolute marriages and homosexuals. Kasper also has the promotion of ever closer relations with that of the Lutheran and Protestant worlds as a whole."
The Amazon Synod was the logical consequence of a policy "aimed at affirming the triumph of syncretism in the name of the only God of a world unity religion." As such, this could be "recognized and revered under every form, symbol and deity, whether Christian or pagan."
The result is a Catholic Church "which, despite assertions to the contrary, is reduced to a mere agency for the promotion of good, a kind of NGO empowered solely for support, solidarity and hospitality without any conversion purpose, and rather interested in subjecting faith to the project of planetary globalism. Only in this way can the Koran recited in the Church be declared a sign of respect for Muslim migrants who are welcomed in the name of universal Soros goodness."Archbishop Vigano is therefore right, says Mascarucci:
"The time has come to discuss the Second Vatican Council and the fruits it produced, in the hope that the future Pope will submit the request for a profound revision in the sign of the only true faith, the only true Gospel, the only true Magisterium and the only true Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the God incarnated for the salvation of mankind, as its own."
Text: Giuseppe Nardi Picture: MiL/Vatican.va (Screenshot)
[1] Americo Mascarucci: La rivoluzione di Papa Francesco. Come cambia la Chiesa da don Milani a Lutero, Historica Edizioni, Cesena 2018.
[2] Americo Mascarucci: La Chiesa nella politica. Come cambiata la CEI da Ruini a papa Francesco, Historica Edizioni, Cesena 2019.
[3] Enzo Mazzi: Il valore dell'eresia, ManifestoLibri, Rome 2010.
Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com
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