Tuesday, January 24, 2006
BISHOP BRUSKEWITZ BY BRIAN MERSHON
There's a good article and short interview at the Renew America website by Brian Mershon about the Pope's call to view Vatican II as pastoral and consistent with Tradition, and Bishop Bruskewitz's successful efforts to heed that call, leading to his full seminary. The interview also includes Bishop Alvaro Corrada of Tyler, Texas, another defender of the Traditional faith.
You can tell Mershon has his finger on the contemporary pulse by this passage:
He [Cdl. Ratzinger] continued: "The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest."
Indeed, these battles cited by the Pope from St. Basil after the Council of Nicaea are still taking place in the Church in the West, and in particular, in the United States. Every day in news accounts from around the globe, cardinal seems to be pitted against cardinal, bishop against bishop, priest against priest. Much of this, especially at the clerical level, is not done with direct confrontation, but if a Catholic reads the Catholic news regularly, he can easily detect the contradictory doctrines taught in the U.S. Church and throughout the world, and can decipher "the signs of the times" in 2006 as Gaudium et Spes encouraged.
Only, today's "signs" are not exactly what the council fathers had in mind in the 1960s.
