nunia
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作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
'The Church - The evolution of Catholicism' by Richard McBrien
With the death of Pope Pius XII on Oct 9, 1958, Cardinal Roncalli was elected by his fellow cardinals to be Pope John XXIII. By the time of his death on June 3, 1963, John XXIII had become the most beloved pope in history.
The Announcement of and Preparations for the Council
It was on January 25, 1959, the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, that Pope John XXIII announced at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, during a brief address to a small group of cardinals marking the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, that he intended to convene a diocesan synod for Rome and an ecumenical council. With regard to the latter, he said that he was motivated "solely by a concern for the 'good of souls' and in order that the new pontificate may come to grips, in a clear and well-defined way, with the spiritual needs of the present time. ( Two years later, the pope noted that the cardinals had received his announcement in "impressive, devout silence.") He had invited the assembled cardinals to submit confidential opinions and suggestions about his idea for a council, but few did so, and those who did expressed their views "in cold and formal language." The cardinals who had just elected him three months earlier had expected John XXIII to be a transitional pope, not a groundbreaker. His announcement of the council was all the more disconcerting to the cardinals because the pope made it clear that his decision was final. He said that he was "humbly resolute" in it, and that it was "a decisive resolution."
The preparations for this Second Vatican Council were the most extensive in the history of the Church. Ideas for the council's agenda was solicited from every bishop in the Catholic world, from the heads of clerical religious orders ( but no orders of religious women), and from Catholic universities and theological faculties as well as members of the Roman Curia. Over 9,300 proposals were submitted. The material was indexed and distributed to eleven preparatory commissions appointed by the pope in June 1960 to formulate draft documents for discussion. These commissions met between Nov. 1960 and June 1962 and produced over seventy documents, or schemata. These documents, in turn, were reduced to twenty separate texts, each of which was reviewed and revised by the Central Preparatory Commission before being submitted to the pope for his approval.
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John XXIII had officially convoked the council on Christmas Day 1961 in an apostolic constituion, Humanae salutis (Lat. "Of human salvation"). ...
Pope John XXIII's Opening Address
The pope expressed the hope in his historic address on the first day of the council that Vatican II would bless the Church with greater spiritual riches and new energies, so that the Church might "look to the future without fear." Then he launched into his of-quoted criticism of unnamed curial officials who are burdened, he said, with a negative, pessimistic view of the world and of the future of the Church:
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In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who. though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but precarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse and they behave as though they have learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former councils everythign was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.
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Although the "greatest concern" of the council must be that "the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously," the "salient point" of Vatican II is not a discussion of one or another article of faith or doctrine of the Church. "For this," the pope observed, "a council was not necessary .. The substance of the ancient doctrine of the Deposit of Faith is one thing, and the way it is presented is another." It is the latter, he insisted, that needs to be taken into great consideration by a magisterium that must always be "predominantly pastoral in character."
Errors come and go, "like fog before the sun." The Church has always opposed errors regarding the faith and, in the past, did so "with the greatest severity. Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations." At this council, the pope continued, the Catholic Church "desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness toward children separated from her" and "she spreads everywhere the fullness of Christian charity, than which nothing is more effective in eradicating the seeds of discord, nothing more efficacious in promoting concord, just peace and the brotherly unity of all." He concluded: "This council now beginning rises in the Church like daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light. It is now only dawn."
It was only in the light of subsequent developments during the council itself and then immediately after it that the significance of John XXIII's opening address became unmistakably clear. Nowadays, it is practically impossible to understand the work of the council, both as an event and as the producer of sixteen documents, except through the prism of this speech.
The pope and his council had broken with the habits and customary approaches of the post-Tridentine, Counter-Reformation Catholic Church - approaches that had held sway since the middle of the sixteenth century. The spirit of the conciliar Church was to be characterized by a hope that would banish fear and pessimism. But it would not be a superficial hope, equivalent to false optimism. This hope is a theological virtue ( along with faith and love) and is rooted in the workings of the Holy Spirit and Divine Providence.
The Church's stance in the face of error and dissent was to be no longer one of condemnations and punitive actions, but one of patience and mercy. The most effective way to deal with error, the pope said, is through a positive and compelling presentation of the truth. And even there, the Church must always be mindful of the crucially important distinction between the substance of faith and the way in which it is presented. In all things, charity. Finally, John XXIII made it clear that Vatican II was only the beginning a new day, not its climax, much less its fulfillment. "It is now only dawn."
The Church and the World
Although the principal theological contributions of Karl Rahner (d. 1984) were not in the area of ecclesiology, he too prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council. Among his key ecclesiological insights was the idea of the Church as a diaspora community. ...
As previously noted, Rahner adapted a saying of St. Augustine, found in his homily on Baptism: "Many whom God has, the Church does not have; and many whom the Church has, God does not have". In other words, there are many in the Kingdom ( doing the will of God, knowingly or not) who are not in the Church, and many in the Church (confessing the Lordship of Jesus) who are not in the Kingdom. Where is it sad, Rahner asks, that the Church must have the whole 100 percent? God must have all.
He noted that some events in the history of salvation "ought not" to be, but are and "must" be so (.e.g. the crucifixion of Jesus). The minority, diaspora condition of the Church is one of those "musts" of salvation history. It is a situation not only permitted by God, but positively willed by God for reasons beyond our understanding. But we must draw our conclusions from this. It means that the Church is no longer "in possession" and cannot act as if it were. The age of Christendom is over. The Church must attract people to itself on the basis of free choice rather than social and cultural convention or in response to political pressure. Those who belong to the Church must do so as a matter of personal conviction, not simply of habit.
But is the Church's minority status not a countersign of God's will on behalf of the Church? Rahner reminds us that beginnings are often disappointingly meager, a point that Yves Congar also made. St. Benedict of Nursia (d. ca. 550) did not know that he was founding a new Western civilization when he went out with a few monks to reestablish monasticism on Monte Cassino. In the diaspora situation, Rahner argued, the initiative can still be the Church's, if Christians are Christian by faith and conviction rather than by cultural or political attachments.
p222
From the time of Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century until the threshold of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-twentieth century, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and many Christian theologians tended to view the world in negative terms, as a place of testing and probation, of no lasting value in itself. The purpose of the Church is to guide people into heaven. The world is simply the place where the quest for salvation occurs. It is as if, in ecclesiologist Yves Congar's words, "We are aboard a vessel whose destiny is to go to the bottom; man will be saved by journeying in another ship built wholly by God." Congar characterizes this as the dualistic-eschatological view, which is by no means limited to Catholics. He points out that it was a view strongly held by Martin Luther and his twentieth-century Calvinist counterpart Karl Barth (d. 1968).
On the other hand, some CAtholic theologians, like Congar himself and the famous Jesuit scientist Teilhard de Chardin (d. 1955), adhered to an incarnationalist view, which affirms the intrinsic value of the world because it has been transformed and redeemed by Jesus Christ, permeated now by the Holy Spirit, and destined for eternal glory in accordance with the Creator's designs. Such theologians were not creating something brand-new, but were retrieving a perspective and a set of insights that were more consistent with those of the early Church than with the neo-Scholastic theology of the Counter-Reformation. The retrieval process, known as ressourcement (also rendered resourcement, Fr., "a return to the sources," i.e., Scripture and the writings of the Fathers of the Church), was especially prominent in Europe, particularly France, in the years immediately after World War II.
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KARL RAHNER
"The relation between Church and world has a history," Karl Rahner writes, albeit somewhat opaquely. "The relation is not and must not always be the same. It is historically changing because the world as an individual and collective history of freedom and also the Church in its official ministry and above all in its members is subject to faults and even succumbs to guilt." The Church, Rahner notes, "only slowly" came to acknowledge the legitimate autonomy of the world, including its sciences and its social, political, and economic organizations. "Changes in the Church and in the world mutually interact. .. The Church comes to know itself more and more as 'not of this world' and at the same time as the sacrament of the absolute future of the world," which is the final Kingdom of God.
Rahner identifies two fundamental ways of misconceiving the relation between Church and world. The one he calls Integrism ( a term already in circulation in early-twentieth-century France) and the other, Esotericism. "Integrism," he points out, "regards the world as mere material for the action and self-manifestation of the Church, and wants to integrate the world into the Church." Esotericism, on the other hand, is also a "false attitude towards the world...in which what is secular is regarded as a matter of indifference for Christianity, for a life directed towards salvation and therefore towards God's absolute future."
Both Integrism and Esotericism reject from opposite extremes the intrinsic value of the world. For the former, the world cannot be sanctified unless and until it has been brought under the domains of the Church. For the latter, the world is so evil that mere contact with it is corrupting and must always be avoided. In Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr's terminology, the integrist approach is equivalent to his model of "the Christ of cultur"; the esotericist approach, to Niebuhr's model of "Christ against culture." For Rahner, the "true relation of the Christian and the Church to the world lies in the mean between these two extremes." ( ref. Aristotle 'The Doctrine of the Mean' & 'The Doctrine of the Mean' in Chinese society )
"We remember: A Reflection on the Shoah"
In 1998 the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, under the leadership of Cardinal Edward Cassidy, an Australian, issued a highly publicized document on the Holocaust entitled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." Many Jewish leaders were disappointed in the statement because the earlier statements of the German and French hierarchies had actually gone much further in acknowledging that the Church itself, and not just some individual members, bears responsibility for the moral climate that allowed Nazism to flourish in Christian Europe. Nevertheless, at the end of the "We Remember" statement, the commission did testify to its "deep sorrow for the failure of [the Church's] sons and daughters in every age" and to its desire to make an act of repentance since, as members of the Church, "we are linked to the sins as well as the merits of all her children." The statement also expressed the Church's "firm resolve to build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Judaism among Christians or anti-Christian sentiment among Jews, but rather a mutual respect."
{ My personal view on Church's role with the rise of anti-semitism is this: if Chinese are not invoking the guilt of Roman Catholic Church to be responsible for the atrocity of Stalinist and other Communism regimes. Instead, they defend their nations right to fight head-on with the imperialism these developing countries suffered under the widespread of capitalism nurtured within Christian nations, the Jewish state and the Jewish people should be more reflective on their religion's weakness to combat global anti-semitism }
COROLLARY ON DISSENT IN THE CHURCH
Perhaps the best and clearest explanation of the meaning of and criteria for dissent, or nonreception, is Richard A. McCormick's "The Church and Dissent: How Vatican II Ushered in a New Way of Thinking."
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He concludes his detailed examination of dissent in the Church with a quotation from Pope John Paul II's book 'The Acting Person, written prior to his election as pope in 1978: "The structure of a human community is correct only if it admits not just the presence of a justified opposition, but also that effectiveness of opposition which is required by the common good and the right of participation." These words, McCormick writes, "are no less true of the church than of any community."
作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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约翰二十三世: 五年帶領天主教進入一個新的聖靈降臨時代
