Fr.
Brian W. Harrison, O.S.
REMNANT
GUEST COLUMNIST, Puerto
Rico
Like
Christopher Ferrara, I saw George Sim Johnston’s
article, “Why Vatican II Was Necessary” in the March 2004 issue of Crisis magazine, and I must confess I
reacted in much the same way as Mr. Ferrara (Remnant, March 15, 2004).
I
am afraid that Mr. Ferrara’s less-than-enthusiastic view of the Council tends to
be supported by certain other skeletons in the conciliar closet that I have personally discovered in the
last few weeks. They are ‘buried’ in the dozens of huge (and largely
inaccessible) Latin tomes containing the complete record of everything
officially done and said at the Council (the Acta Synodalia),
and I doubt whether they have been made known to the general public so
far.
One
of the many difficulties in interpreting the Council’s Declaration on Religious
Liberty, and reconciling it with traditional doctrine, lies in the fact that
while the key article 2 of this document, Dignitatis Humanae (DH), begins by affirming that the right to
religious liberty has to do with conscientiously held religious beliefs,
it ends by affirming that the same
right is enjoyed even by those who are not in good conscience (that is, those
who “do not fulfill their obligation of seeking and adhering to the truth”).
Curious as to whether this confusing, and at first sight contradictory,
treatment of conscience in DH #2 was
officially explained to the Council Fathers before they voted on it, I started
fishing around in the Acta Synodalia (AS) in our university library. And what
I dredged up struck me as a choice example of how that famous ‘Rhine’ flowed
into the ‘
The
above passage recognizing immunity from coercion for those whose religious
propaganda is not in good conscience
was absent from the first three drafts of DH. It finally appeared in the fourth
(second-last) draft, presented on October 25, 1965, only a few weeks before the
end of the Council (cf. AS IV, V, p.
79). Bishop Emil De Smedt, the Dutch relator (official
spokesman for the drafting Commission), then gave his relatio (speech) to the assembled
Fathers officially explaining this fourth draft and its changes to the previous
draft. However, in doing so he did not
even mention this important addition to the text! On the contrary, in
commenting on the new version of article 2, De Smedt
repeatedly stressed the importance of conscience, citing the (unchanged) words
in the first paragraph of #2 which assert that the human person must not be
forced to act against (or be prevented from acting in accordance with) “his
conscience” (“suam conscientiam”
– see ibid., pp. 101-102). True, the
Fathers all had on their desks printed copies of the old and new drafts in
parallel columns, but it looks as if De Smedt was
hoping that if he didn’t draw their attention to this change, many would either
overlook it or not attach much importance to it.
In
another lengthy hand-out, which was not read on the floor of the Council, we
find in the fine print that this change had been requested “in the name of more
than one hundred” Fathers (ibid.,p. 116, #25). But the reader
is not told who these hundred-plus Fathers were; and there is still not the
slightest explanation from De Smedt as to how the role
of conscience in religious liberty was now to be understood in the light of
these contrasting statements within the same article of the
document.
Did
Bishop De Smedt perhaps honestly think this textual
addition wasn’t important enough to
warrant an official explanation? That excuse looks lame on the face of it, and
looks even lamer in the light of what finally transpired. For during the next
few weeks, when the fifth and final draft of DH was being worked on, three Fathers
submitted a request to the Commission that this confusing addition favoring
persons in bad conscience be simply
omitted. A number of others asked that it be significantly amended. But in his
final relatio, De Smedt acknowledged these requests only to dismiss them
summarily, stating that the addition was too important and substantial to be
omitted, and, moreover, it had already been approved by a large majority in the
vote on the fourth draft taken back in October! But did the Dutch prelate
finally give the Fathers at least some explanation of this “substantial” change
which he now declared was immutable? No way. Still not a
word. The unexplained amendment had been quickly, quietly, and
misleadingly, pushed through without any debate and without public attention
being drawn to it. But afterwards, when some more conservative Fathers finally
expressed their disagreement with the amendment, they were told abruptly that it
was now set in stone.
Another
discovery I have made in the Acta Synodalia is
relevant to the scandal provoked nearly two years ago when Cardinal William
Keeler announced that, as far as he and an important committee of American
theologians were concerned, the Catholic Church no longer believes it necessary,
or even legitimate, to try and convert Jews to Christianity. Cardinal Keeler was
soon backed up (with perhaps a minor nuance or two) by the top
Well,
what, if anything, did the Council itself say in this point? In researching the
textual history of the Vatican II Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate
(NA), I have found that the
original draft of article 4 in that document was actually quite up-front and
positive about Catholic hopes for Jewish conversions to the true faith. It
included this passage: “It is important to recall that the integration of the
Jewish people into the Church is part of Christian hope. For, according to the
Apostle’s teaching (cf. Rom. 11: 25), the Church awaits with unshakable faith
and deep longing the entry of this people into the fullness of the People of
God, which has been restored by Christ” (AS III, VIII, p. 640, my translation).
In the biblical verse cited here, the Holy Spirit, through
Now,
readers will probably agree that this original draft of NA #4, together with its biblical
citation, doesn’t sound exactly in the ‘spirit’ of Their Eminences Keeler and
Kasper. Come to think of it, have you ever heard any post-conciliar Pope or
In
fairness, it should be added here that the new Catechism of the Catholic Church does
present us with St. Peter at Pentecost preaching to the Jews their need for
conversion, and continues to teach the revealed truth that
Let
us return to Nostra Aetate. I have discovered that the near-silence and
inactivity of the post-conciliar Church establishment
regarding the Jews’ need for conversion can probably be traced to a conscious
decision of the Council itself during the preparation of this Declaration. When
the revised draft of NA was
circulated, with the original draft in parallel columns, the Fathers found that
the aforesaid section in article 4 about the conversion of the Jews, with its
specific citation of Romans 11: 25, had now been totally omitted. And (unlike
Bishop De Smedt) the relator for this document, the
German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, was quite open
about the reason why the original version was now considered unacceptable: “Very
many Fathers,” Bea announced in his relatio, “have requested that in
talking about this ‘hope’, since it has to do with a mystery, we should avoid every appearance of
proselytism. Others have asked that the same Christian hope, applying to all
peoples, should also be expressed somehow. In the present
version of this paragraph we have sought to satisfy all these requests” (ibid., p. 648, emphasis added).
The tactic of His Eminence and all those “very many” (but unnamed) Fathers was
thus to tarnish the previous draft with the pejorative label “proselytism”, and
to ‘elevate’ the future conversion of the Jews to the ethereal status of a
“mystery”, thereby insinuating that it will somehow ‘just happen’ spontaneously
one day without the necessity of any human missionary activity on the part of
Catholics.
The
tactic, combined with the great personal prestige of Cardinal Bea, worked
perfectly. The vast majority of the Fathers duly voted in favor of the new
draft, thereby relegating to the finest of fine print this particular point of
our “unshakable faith” regarding the Jews. It proved to be literally
unmentionable in a modern conciliar document, and so
has been ‘buried’ in the middle of a much longer passage of the Epistle to the
Romans which is indicated (but not cited) among various other biblical
references to NA #4. What now appears
in that passage is a much blander statement referring to Christian hopes for
mankind in general. And in accord with the
non-threatening spirit of this ‘pastoral’ Declaration, all explicit mention of
anyone actually joining, entering or returning to the Catholic Church has been
carefully excised. We read that “the Church awaits the day, known to God alone,
when all peoples will call on God with one voice and ‘serve him shoulder to
shoulder’ (Soph. 3:9; cf. Is. 66:23; Ps. 65: 4; Rom.
11: 11-32)”.
Doesn’t
that sound a whole lot more . . . friendly than the original draft? At
any rate, the history of this textual change perhaps helps explain why the
top-level talk disparaging any further evangelization of the Jews has still,
after nearly two years, not elicited any rebuttal from either the Supreme
Pontiff or Cardinal Ratzinger (both of whom, of
course, were active at Vatican II). For if he were challenged on this issue,
Kasper the Friendly Dialogue-Partner could point straight back to the Friendly
Kouncil. After all, how much difference is there
between its officially endorsed admonition to “avoid every appearance of
proselytizing” Jews and the Keeler/Kasper doctrine that Catholics should not
“target the Jews for conversion”? It is not that Vatican II actually taught this falsehood now being
propagated with impunity even by Princes of the Church; but we can see now that
the Council paved the way for the diffusion of that error by consciously
declining to teach – or even to suggest – the opposing, but ‘politically
incorrect’, truth.