NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

The progressives insist on a rhetoric of 'two Churches' because they cannot accept that this Pope - as did the Popes before him - see Vatican-II as growth in continuity, not a discontinuity with everything that came before it. Here is the translation of a commentary picked up by Lella from the online opinion journal of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi's party:

What's behind all the opposition
to Benedict's Motu Proprio on the Mass
By Gianteo Bordero


There are those who choose to interpret ideologically - and therefore to fight ideologically - the Pope's Motu Proprio on the use of the pre-1970 Mass in order to 'derail' the line being laid down by Benedict XVI's Pontificate.

A harsh battle has been launched by the ideologues who read Vatican-II as a rupture with the past and a new beginning altogether for the Catholic Church - a harshness that is barely masked by the tone of the arguments employed so far and by some lingering respect for the figure of the Pope - against Papa Ratzinger's initiatives to show that Vatican-II is very much within the bimillenial tradition of the Catholic Church, a continuity accompanied by growth.

One only has to read, for instance, recent statements and writings by people like Enzo Bianchi, prior of Bose, and some Italian bishops to realize this.

Bianchi [a lay monk who founded the ecumenical monastic community of Bose near Milan as a post-Vatican-II 'rediscovery of Christian life based on listening to the Gospel'] wrote in La Repubblica: "Is not the Missal of St. Pius V for many a mark of identification, by preferring it to the Mass celebrated by other Catholics, as if the liturgy of Paul VI lacked elements essential to the faith?"

[First, one must object to the pointed - and patently wrong - use of the term 'Mass of Pius V' which refers to the pre-1965 form, when the form specified by the Motu Proprio is the 1965 form, the John XXIII Mass. But Bianchi and his fellow ideologues insist on referring to the Pius V Mass, because that is the Mass associated with the Lefebvrians, whom the progressives consider totally beneath consideration, and to give some credence to their accusation of backwardness against Benedict.]

Well, let's turn that around: Does not the Prior of Bose think that the Missal of Paul VI has become in the past few decades, for even a far greater number of progressives, the battlecry for defending an ecclesiastical and social situation that no longer exists, namely the roaring 60s and 70s of the progressives' post-conciliar heyday?

Isn't it equally valid that many progressive ideologues are flaunting Paul VI's Mass as their own mark of identification, as if the traditional Mass used by the Council itself "lacked elements essential to the faith"?

The truth is that this ideological reading does not get us very far, because it was precisely to stem such ideological dichotomy latent in the two Masses that Benedict XVI issued his Motu Proprio, underscoring that "these two expressions of the Church's lex orandi do not lead in any way to a division in its lex credendi; they are, in fact, two forms of a single Roman rite."

We can raise analogous objections to points raised by some Italian bishops like the Bishop of Alba, Mons. Dho, in an article in Vita Pastorale, a magazine of the St. Paul publishing enterprise.

Dho, at the end of an an analysis that called the Motu Proprio 'restrictive' - quite against the spirit of liberalness that the Pope said should be shown to the faithful who want to celebrate the traditional Mass - writes: "It is difficult not to fear, with reason, that a practice of the type authorized by the Pope [that the parish priest must allow the use of the older rite for the Mass and other sacraments, provided there is a priest competent to do it] risks creating a parallel Church that will be hard to integrate with the entire parochial community."

As if to say that the Motu Proprio would 'legitimize' the presence, within the Church, of two Churches - a pre-conciliar and a post-conciliar - each with its own rules and rites. Two Churches that are opposed to each other and not in communion at all. And where, it goes without saying, the true Church would be the post-conciliar one and the true Mass, the reformed Mass.

This is to ignore what the Pope himself says in the Motu Proprio. Far from feeding conflict, he wants to put an end precisely to this rhetoric of "two Churches". In this, he is merely being consistent with what he has said for years, in various books, articles speeches, interviews.

In 1994, he told Vittorio Messori, in the book Rapporto sulla Fede [The Ratzinger Report, in its English edition]:

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"One must definitely oppose this schematism of a before and after in the history of the Church, totally unjustified by the documents of Vatican II itself which consistently reaffirm the continuity of Catholicism. There is no pre- or post-Conciliar Church...There is only a single Church on a journey towards the Lord, with an increasingly more profound and better understanding of the deposit of faith that Christ himself entrusted to it. This is a history without gaps, without ruptures, without a dissolution of continuity."

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Therefore, if overcoming the rhetoric of 'two Churches' is proving to be an imprint that characterizes the Ratzinger pontificate, then it is clear that the representatives of 'progressive' Catholicism, in all their various nuances, are really attacking the essence of the Ratzinger Papacy itself by attacking the Motu Proprio.

Between now and September 14 - when the Motu Proprio takes effect - it is very likely we are in for a crescendo of criticisms and contrary voices. And this only confirms implicitly the epochal significance of Summorum Pontificum.

Ragionpolitica, 2 agosto 2007