Sunday, 1/18/15
Pope Francis is
receiving such a grand welcoming in the Philippines this weekend, that instead
of my referring to the Sunday morning readings, I would like to speak about how
Francis offers an outlook different from that of the last two popes.
The last two popes
were active contributors to the finest documents produced by Vatican II, but at
the time they argued against the inclusion of the paragraph 19 of the final
document. It reads:
“The dignity of man rests above all on the
fact that he is called to communion with God. The invitation to converse with
God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being.”
Pope John Paul II
and Pope Benedict were then bishops Wojtyla and Ratzinger, and like most
European theologians, they believed that humans could not converse with God
until their Original Sins were removed by Baptism.
The opposite view
that was adopted by the majority of Vatican II’s bishops was that Jesus, by
taking on our humanity in Mary’s womb, restored all humans to friendship with
God.
At the very middle
of the Twentieth Century the Roman Curia silenced three Frenchmen who had come to
the strong defense of that view. One of those three was a layman named Maurice,
a second was a Jesuit named Henri, and the third was a Dominican named Yves.
Each of the three,
independent of the others, had taken on shelves of early Greek and Latin
Christian documents, rendering them into modern French. Together, they coined
the word ressourcement. By it they asserted that to be genuine Christian
teaching, doctrines need to have their source in what was taught by the
Apostles and the Church's first generation.
The layman Maurice
Blondel for his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1880 used solid principles
of Philosophy to prove that for every type of human actions it is a reaching
for God that causes one to overcome inertia.
The future Jesuit
Henri, while fighting as an enlisted man in the four years of World War One, had
a German bullet graze his skull. Later, when he was a seminarian, his Jesuit
superior sent him to the south of France to look for relief from the pain of
his wound. On that leave he met up
with Maurice, and they became collaborators. Where Maurice use he Philosophy to
prove that man naturally reaches for God, Henri used his Theology to prove that
God reaches down to each of his humans.
Father Yves Congar,
a four-year Nazi prisoner, followed Maurice and Henri in saying all unbaptized
humans are capable of winning heaven by good lives.
Rome’s main theologians,
since the Council of Trent, had seen a strong difference between the baptized and
the non-baptized. That is what I learned in the seminary course on Sanctifying
Grace that I studied between September and December of 1950. On my Christmas
vacation at home that year, I told my father that the good deeds of
non-baptized people were incapable of earning a heavenly reward. My dad said,
“Na! I don’t believe that. Heaven isn’t just for old biddies who mumble their
prayers. No God rewards all good men and women.”
Maurice Blondel died
in 1949, but Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar were alive in 1950 when Pius XII
issued the encyclical Humani Generis which
roundly disapproved of the views held by the three. Rome ordered Henri and Yves
to be removed from their professorships and to have their books banned.
However, Rome’s
Apostolic Delegate to France who had the job of silencing the two was Bishop
Giuseppi Roncalli who secretly disagreed with his Roman superiors. And three
months after he was elected pope in 1958 he called for convening Vatican II,
and he appointed Henri and Yves to be special advisors to the bishops at the
council.
Although many
European bishops disagreed with our trio’s interpretation of Catholic Doctrine,
a large majority of bishops from around the world agreed with them. Their
strongest support came from the South America that was to give us good Pope
Francis.
1 comment:
Hi Father, everyone seems to like Pope Francis. He seems so very down to earth and not nigh and lofty like , some other Popes have been. He has been a breath of fresh air to the Church. God bless, TCL
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