Chapter 24 - FILL IN HERE
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The Robber Council
of Vatican II
It is advantageous to find a precedent to the Second Vatican Council, at least in regard to the methods that were used in it by the active liberal minority which quickly became the majority. In this respect, the general Council of Ephesus (449 AD) is to be mentioned under the title that Pope Saint Leo I afterwards gave it: the “Robber Council of Ephesus.” It was presided over by an ambitious and unscrupulous bishop: Dioscorus, who, through the help of his monks and of imperial soldiers, exerted an unheard-of pressure on the Fathers of the Council. The presidency that the papal legates claimed was refused them; the pontifical letters were not read. This Council, which was not ecumenical for that reason, ended by declaring, as orthodox, the heretic Eutyches, who upheld the error of monophysitism (one sole nature in Christ).
Vatican II was likewise a robber Council, except for this difference, that the Popes (John XXIII and Paul VI), although present, did not oppose the surprise attack of the liberals with resistance, or at least very little, and even favored their enterprises. How was this possible? Proclaiming this Council to be pastoral and not dogmatic, putting the stress on aggiornamento and ecumenism, these popes at the outset deprived the Council and themselves of the intervention of the charism of infallibility which would have protected them from all error.
In the present conference, I will relate three of the maneuvers of the liberal clique at Vatican II.
Attack on the Conciliar Commissions
The Pélerin Magazine of November 22, 1985, reported some very instructive secrets told by Cardinal Liénart to a journalist, Claude Beaufort, in 1972, on the first general session of the Council. I will read to you in extenso that article entitled “Cardinal Liénart: ‘The Council, the Apotheosis of My Life.’” I will content myself with bringing my observations to this.1
October 13, 1962: The Council Vatican II holds its first working session. The order of the day foresees that the Assembly designates the members of the specialized Commissions called to help it in its task. But the 2,300 Fathers gathered in the immense nave of Saint Peter’s hardly know one another. Can they, right away, elect competent teams? The Curia evades the difficulty: along with the balloting forms are distributed the lists of the former preparatory commissions established by itself. The invitation to renew the same teams is clear…
What would be more normal than to reelect to the conciliar commissions those who, for three years, had prepared irreproachable texts in the midst of the preparatory commissions? Obviously, this proposal could not be to the liking of the innovators.
On entering the basilica, Cardinal Liénart was informed of this very ambiguous procedure by Cardinal Lefebvre, Archbishop of Bourges. Both of them know the great diffidence of the pre-conciliar commissions, their cast of mind very Roman and not very much harmonized to the sensibility of the universal Church. They dread that the same causes will produce the same effects. The bishop of Lille sits on the Board of presidency for the Council. This position, [explained by] his interlocutor judges, permits him to intervene, to thwart the workings, to insist on the lapse of time necessary in order that the episcopal conferences may be able to propose representative candidacies.
The Liberals thus dread the Roman theologians and schemas. In order to obtain commissions of a liberal—let us use this word—sensibility, new lists must be prepared which will include members of the world-wide liberal mafia: a little organization and at the beginning, immediate intervention will attain the goal.
Helped by Bishop Garrone, Cardinal Lefebvre prepared a text in Latin which he slipped to Cardinal Liénart.
Here you have a text already completely prepared by Cardinal Lefebvre, Archbishop of Bourges.2 There has therefore not been any improvisation, but premeditation, let us say, preparation, and organization between cardinals of liberal sentiment.
Ten years later, this one [Cardinal Liénart] recalled his state of mind on that day in the following terms:
I was cornered. Either, convinced that this was not reasonable, I would say nothing and fail in my duty; or indeed I would speak out. We could not resign from our function, which was to elect. So, I took my paper and I leaned over towards Cardinal Tisserant who was beside me and who was presiding, and said to him, “Eminence, I cannot vote. This is not reasonable; we do not know one another. I ask you for the floor.”
He answered me, “That is impossible. The order of the day does not foresee any debate. We have assembled simply to vote. I cannot give you the floor.”
I said to him, “Then I am going to take it” I got up and, trembling, read my paper. I immediately realized that my intervention met the anxiety of all those who were there. They applauded. Then Cardinal Frings, who was a little farther away, got up and said the same thing. The applause got louder. Cardinal Tisserant offered to adjourn the session and to give a report to the Holy Father. All of this had lasted scarcely twenty minutes. The Fathers left the basilica, thus sounding the alarm for the journalists. They put together some fictional stories: “The French bishops in revolt at the Council,” etc. This was not a revolt, it was a discreet consideration. By my rank and by circumstances, I was obliged to speak; otherwise I would be giving up. For inwardly, this would have been a resignation.
Leaving the conciliar aula, a Dutch bishop straightforwardly expressed his thoughts and those of the liberal French and German bishops, by yelling out at a priest among his friends who was some distance away, “Our first victory!“3
IDOC, or The Poisoning
One of the liberal clique’s most effective means of pressure on the Council was IDOC,4 The Institute of Documentation, at the service of the productions of the liberal intelligentia, which flooded the conciliar Fathers with innumerable texts. IDOC itself declared that it had distributed, up to the end of the third conciliar session, more than four million sheets! The organization and the productions of IDOC went back to the Dutch episcopal conference; the financing was assured in part by Father Werenfried (alas) and by Cardinal Cushing, archbishop of Boston in the United States. The huge secretariat was located on the Via dell’Amina in Rome.
On our side for the conservative bishops, we had certainly tried to counterbalance this influence, thanks to Cardinal Larraona, who placed his secretariat at our disposal. We had typewriters and copiers and a few people, three or four. We were very busy, but this was insignificant in comparison with the organization of IDOC! Some Brazilians, members of the T.F.P., helped us with unheard-of devotion, working at night to copy the studies that had been written up by five or six bishops, that is to say, the directing committee of the Cœtus Internationalis Patrum, which I had founded with Bishop Carli, Bishop of Segni, and Bishop de Proença Sigaud, archbishop of Diamantina in Brazil. Two hundred and fifty bishops were affiliated with our organization.5 It was with Father V. A. Berto, my personal theologian, the above-mentioned bishops, and others like Bishop de Castro Mayer and a few Spanish bishops, that we drew up these texts which were then copied at night. Early in the morning, these few Brazilian friends left by car to distribute our sheets in the hotels, in the letter-boxes of the conciliar Fathers, as IDOC was doing with an organization twenty times larger than ours.
IDOC, and many other organizations and meetings of liberals, are the illustration of the fact that there was a conspiracy in this Council, a plot prepared in advance, from years before. They knew what had to be done, how to do it, and who was going to do it. Unfortunately, this plot succeeded; the great majority of the Council was poisoned by the power of the liberal propaganda.
Craftiness of the Writers of the Conciliar Schemas
It is certain that with the 250 conciliar Fathers of the Coetus, we tried with all the means put at our disposal to keep the liberal errors from being expressed in the texts of the Council. This meant that we were able, all the same, to limit the damage, to change these inexact or tendentious assertions, and to add that sentence to rectify a tendentious proposition, an ambiguous expression.
I have to admit that we did not succeed in purifying the Council of the liberal and modernist spirit that impregnated most of the schemas. Their drafters indeed were precisely the experts and the Fathers tainted with this spirit. Now, what can you do when a document is in all its parts drawn up with a false meaning? It is practically impossible to expurgate it of that meaning. It would have to be completely recomposed in order to be given a Catholic spirit.
What we were able to do was, by the modi that we introduced, to have interpolated clauses added to the Schemas. This is quite obvious: it suffices to compare the first schema on religious liberty with the fifth one that was written—for this document was five times rejected and five times brought back for discussion—in order to see that we succeeded just the same in reducing the subjectivism that tainted the first drafts. Likewise for Gaudium et spes, the paragraphs can easily be seen which were added at our request and which are there, I would say, like pieces brought back onto an old coat. It does not stick well together. The logic of the early drafting is no longer there. The additions made to lessen or to counterbalance the liberal assertions remain there like foreign bodies.
It was not only we, the conservatives, who had such paragraphs added; Pope Paul VI himself, you know, had a preliminary explanatory note added to the Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, in order to rectify the false notion of collegiality which is insinuated in the text at n. 22.6
The annoying thing is that the Liberals themselves practiced this system in the text of the schemas: an assertion would be made of an error, an ambiguity or a dangerous orientation, then immediately after or before, an assertion would be declared in the opposite direction, intended to tranquillize the conservative conciliar Fathers.
Thus, in the Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, by writing at (n. 36 #.2): “A more extensive role can be granted to the vernacular language,” and by entrusting to the episcopal assemblies the care of deciding whether the vernacular language will be adopted or not (cf. n. 36 #.3), the drafters of the text opened the door to the suppression of Latin in the liturgy. In order to soften this intention, they took care to write at first, at (n. 36 #.1): “The use of the Latin language, except for particular law, will be kept in the Latin rites.” Reassured by this assertion, the Fathers swallowed the two others without a problem.
Likewise, in the declaration on religious liberty, Digni-tatis humanæ, of which the last schema was rejected by numerous Fathers, Paul VI himself had a paragraph added which said in substance: “This declaration contains nothing that is contrary to tradition.” But everything that is expressed inside is contrary to tradition! Thus, someone will say, “Just read it! It is written, ‘There is nothing contrary to tradition!’7—well, yes, it is written. But that does not stop everything from being contrary to tradition! That sentence was added at the last minute by the pope in order to force the hand of those who—in particular the Spanish bishops—were opposed to this schema. Indeed this maneuver unfortunately succeeded; instead of 250 “no’s” there were only 74—because of a little sentence: “There is nothing contrary to tradition”! Well, let us be logical! They changed nothing in the text! It is easy after the fact to stick on a tag, a label of innocence! Unbelievable behavior!
Let us stop at this point on the robbery aspect, and go on now to the spirit of the Council.
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1 Le Figaro of December 9, 1976, published extracts of a Journal of the Council drawn up by Cardinal Liénart. Michel Martin comments on these excerpts in his article “L’ardoise refilée” in N. 165 of the Courier of Rome (January 1977).
2 Not to be confused with his cousin Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre!
3 Cf. Ralph Wiltgen, The European Alliance, The Rhine Flows into The Tiber, pp. 16 – 17.
4 International Documentation of the Council.
5 Cf. Wiltgen, op. cit, pp. 147.
6 Cf.Wiltgen op. cit., pp. 224 sq.
7 Dignitatis humanæ, n.l, in fine; cf. Chapter XXVII.