Professor Roberto de Mattei (som jeg nevnte her) likte ikke kritikken han fikk for sin bok om Vatikankonsilet – «Il Concilio Vaticano II. Una storia mai scritta» – og har svart ganske grundig på kritikken her. (Nettstedet www.chiesa har ofte svært interessante artikler.)
Han begynner med å skrive at han ville ha foretrukket å bli vurdert av fagteologer eller -historikere, men det har han ikke blitt i denne omgang – dessuten er han blitt kritisert ut fra et ideologisk ståsted og ikke et faglig. Overskrifta på hans innlegger er at «konsilene kan også ta feil», og han bruker så en del tid på å vurdere hvordan Vatikankonsilet og andre konsiler kan og bør vurderes historisk. Her er et utdrag av hans artikkel:
The criticism of Marchetto and Introvigne seems to have a single purpose: to close off preemptively that debate which Benedict XVI has opened with an invitation to develop it. […]
I believe, on the contrary, that Vatican Council II can be discussed on the historical level in a way no different from how Church historians have always done.
Addressing them in 1889, Leo XIII wrote that «those who study it must never lose sight of the fact that it contains an ensemble of dogmatic elements that are imposed upon faith, and that no one can call into question […]. …
… The Church is indefectible, and yet, in its human part, it can commit errors and these errors, these sufferings, can be provoked, Leo XIII says, by its children and even by its ministers. But this takes nothing away from the greatness and indefectibilty of the Church. The Church, Leo XIII said, opening the Vatican archives to scholars, is not afraid of the truth. …
… My book is born from a profound love of the Church, of its magisterium and of its institutions, «in primis» of the papacy. And my love for the papacy wants to be so great as not to stop with the current pope, Benedict XVI, to whom I feel deeply bound, but seeks behind the man the institution that he represents. It is a love that wants to embrace with this pope all of the popes in their historical and intellectual continuity, because for a Catholic the pope is not a man, he is a bimillennial institution; it is not that individual pope, but it is the papacy, it is the uninterrupted series of the vicars of Christ, from Saint Peter to the reigning pontiff.
So then, there is no better way to express one’s attachment to the pope and to the Church than to serve, in all areas, the truth, because there does not exist any truth, historical, scientific, political, philosophical, that could ever be wielded against the Church.
And so we must not be afraid to tell the truth about Vatican Council II, the twenty-first in the history of the Church. I emphasize this word, twenty-first. Vatican Council II was neither the first nor the last Council of the Church’s history: it was a point, it was a moment of the history of the Church.
In the history of the Church, there have been twenty-one Councils that are held as ecumenical today. Some of these are unforgettable: the first, the Council of Nicaea, which defined our «Credo,» then the Council of Trent, Vatican Council I. Other Councils are forgotten today, which does not mean that they were not authentic Councils, supreme expressions of the Church’s magisterium.
But a Council enters into history through the documents that it has produced. In the XVI century there were two Councils: Lateran Council V (1512-1517) and the Council of Trent. The only dogmatic definition of the fifth Lateran Council was that according to which the individual human soul is immortal; the Lateran was under certain aspects a failed Council: …
… No Council, not even Trent or Vatican I, and much less Vatican II, is above Tradition. Benedict XVI affirms that the documents of Vatican Council II must be interpreted in their continuity with the Tradition of the Church. Tradition is not an event, it is not a part, it is the whole. Tradition is like Sacred Scripture: a source of Revelation, with the divine assistance of the Holy Spirit. …
… I have been criticized for overlooking the documents of the Council or for interpreting them in a vein of discontinuity with the Tradition of the Church. Neither the first nor the second statement is true. The interpretation of the documents of the Council is not up to me, nor to any aspiring interpreter of the Council, but it is up to the magisterium of the Church, and to the magisterium I adhere. What I present are the facts, what I reconstruct is the historical context in which those documents came to light. …
… Vatican Council II, let’s not forget, was not a dogmatic Council, but pastoral, which does not mean that it was devoid of magisterium, but its magisterium can be considered definitive and infallible only when it proposes again and explicates, as it often does, truths already defined by the ordinary and extraordinary magisterium of the Church.
The problem that interests me, however, is not the discussion of the texts of the Council; I leave this exegesis to the theologians, and first of all to the pope. The problem that interests me, as a member of the Church, is to understand the historical roots of the crisis that we are going through. Remote roots, because the crisis we are going through is plurisecular, but also close, because the current crisis goes back, even before 1968, to the time of Vatican Council II, which is not necessarily the 16 documents that concluded it, but the words, the actions, the omissions during and after the Council of the conciliar fathers, and, on the other side, the parallel magisterium, above all that of the media, which flanked the authentic magisterium of the pope and the bishops. …
… There is no tempest, however well-publicized or ferocious, that may frighten us, because the Church is always standing through the storms: heresies, scandals, revolutions have not shaken it or halted its march through history.