Benedict XVI has identified two Second Vatican Council documents –
on religious freedom,
and on relations between Christianity and other faiths, espe- cially the Jews – as representing the most significant"encounter with the great themes of the modern epoch” that the council has produced. They are statements "whose import- ance has only gradually come to light” in the years since. They were also key to the formation of the schismatic Society of St Pius X. Its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, insisted that it was his followers,
not the post-conciliar Church, who were faithful
to the Catholic tradition, especially in these areas.Writing in L’Osservatore Romano to mark
the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the council by Pope John XXIII, and on page 14, Pope Benedict is at pains to show that these documents were not a break with the past, which is how they are sometimes represented, but were as
implicit in at least some of what had
gone before.
He appears to be answering the Lefebvrist
argument by claiming
that his "hermeneutic of con- tinuity” applies even to these two, and thus supports his broad contention that
Vatican II did not reinvent Catholicism but
renewed it. In the process,
however, he is making it clear to the Lefebvrists that he cannot revoke or diminish in import- ance these two key documents. It may even be because
they raised them that
he has realised how important they are.Most of the rest of the Church is not as interested in recon- ciliation with the Lefebvrists as Pope Benedict is, and has seen the significance of these statements in different contexts. The second of the two mentioned, Nostra Aetate, has transformed
the Church’s relations with the Jews out of all recognition. The first, Dignitatis Humanae, has planted ideas about freedom of conscience in Catholicism that have yet to be fully worked out.
|