Re: Re: reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches
@apelles wrote:
Glad you said that Prax..Personally I wouldn’t go to Church anymore if they got rid of the obligatory limbo dancing.
Materially, Praxiteles would of course agree that much of what we see in here is just plain nuts and, to use a fashionable expression, simply inexcusable. It is doubtful that any middle of the road punter would want to promote the sheer indignity and baseness of much of what is presented as modern excess.
Where we have to part ways, howver, arrives with the theological interpretation or formal presentation of this material. It is not acceptable, for instance, to posit the thesis that Vat II was, unlike previous Councils, not the object fo teh Holy Spirit’s Guidance of that somehow a legittimately caonvoked and celebrated Oecumenical Council is somehow or other defetable or defective or that its documents are contrary to catholic teaching or that surpeme authority in the Church is somehow or other not functioning for the goof of the Church – all this might easily be seen within the optic of Joachimism and its intellectual progeny in the West.
Likewise, the thesis cannot be theologically posited that there is an opposition bewteen the text of the Council and the spirit of the Concil. That there is a dichotomy between the will of Christ and the the inspiration of the Holy Spirit – as many of those who did the wrecking of churches hold. They forget, however, that theologically the Holy Spirit cannot operate separate from,and much less against, Christ.
Both extremes in this controversy are equally condemnable as far as the Second Vatican Council is concerned. the real way forward to an intelelctual regeneration of Catholicism is to read the texts of the of the Council and set them within their dogmatic and liturgical context. This, although a standard principle of interpretation in canon law, appears only to have been recently discovered and has been dubbed the “hermenutic of continuity” – which in itself says something of those who practice the hermenutic of continuity!
