Vatican II ABOUT FACE! - Chiesa viva

The “Yankee Jesuit”, John O’Malley, wrote in his book
“What happened at the Second Vatican Council” in which
he makes known the “inadequate” liberal-conservative opposition
to understand the conflicts that took place in the
Council. Actually, in his book he talks about a “network of
truly notable interconnections” in the documents of the Second
Vatican Council.
This “network” applies a new vocabulary. The documents
of the Council meetings present a linguistic innovation applied
to different questions; for instance, words like “dialogue,”
“collegiality,” “development,” “brothers and sisters,” “conscience”
(...) The language stand out because it describes and
prescribes new actions of the Church.
Karl Rahner described the Council as a time of the
birth of the “World Church,” after the “Judaic Church”
and the two “Hellenistic” millennias.
The newspaper “L’Osservatore Romano” of January
25, 2010, settled the permanent value of Vatican II stating
that the Council “should be historical rather than mythological.”
However, given the fact that it has been said that
Catholicism could not be practiced without referring to Vatican
II, any hermeneutical position that tries to explore the
continuity with previous teachings must weigh it with the
same pontifical authority to reach the aphorism: “one Pope
stamps it and the next one undoes it!”
We know that in the ancient Church it was common practice
to react to doctrinal crises with Councils as a collective reflection
of the Faith. Nowadays, the Church of Rome has the
option of a self-destructive crisis or a reversal of the Reform.
This was also stated by the most renown intellectuals of our
times, who nonetheless reminded us that a breakup [of the Reform]
was a positive commitment of the Church to open to a
greater understanding of the “Deposit of Faith” and a greater
fidelity to the spirit of Its Founder!
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