A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Rampant heresy in the Church directly attributable to the Second Vatican Council November 18, 2015

I have been wanting to excerpt portions from Phoenix from the Ashes for some time. The problem I’ve had is that the material is so dense and involved (in a good way) that a lot of excerpts, to make sense, would run 2000 words or more. And I know posts that long tend not to get read very much.

But, I found a few brief bits that convey a whole lot in a blog-friendly length.  Author HJA Sire really explodes the notion of female fauxrdination, and in so doing exposes the heresy that is inherent in the post-conciliar ethos.  The Council opened the Church, doctrinally, to numerous modernist notions, including feminist ones.  That relatively narrow conciliar opening has metastasized into numerous areas, one of the most malicious being the notion that women could be ordained to the priesthood.  Even worse, however, has been the corruption of the entire idea of the priesthood.  Ultimately, the Council bears great responsibility for this and many other widely prevalent errors:

Next to the denial of defined dogmas, there is no clearer case of heresy than the advocacy of female ordination: it rejects not only the tradition of the Church from its origins, but divine institution itself; it ignores the condemnations that have declared female ordination heretical, and implies a blasphemous view of Christ’s wisdom and justice in instituting the priesthood in the male sex.  No heresy more comprehensively discards every principle by which Christian doctrine is decided.  The orthodox teaching has been repeated most recently by John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis of 1994, in which he wrote: “We declare that the Church has no authority whatever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”  As one would expect in the modern Church, the ruling has been entirely disregarded.  In June 1997 the Catholic Theological Society of America voted by a majority of 216 to 22 that the pope should reconsider the question of women’s ordination.  This evidence that nine out of ten official theologians in the United States are heretics comes as no surprise; nor does one imagine that their unorthodoxy is confined to that sole point. In 2011  likewise some 200 Austrian clergy signed a manifesto demanding female ordination.  In the general run of seminaries, professors reject the orthodox teaching privately and often publicly, and the priests they train treat it as simply another conservative relic that is due for change.  We see here exemplified the contempt in the present-day Church for Scripture, Tradition, and authority, and we see, too, the harvest of submission to modern ideology that the Church sowed in the Second Vatican Council and is now reaping.  [I should add, prior to this paragraph, Sire had spent several pages explaining exactly HOW Vatican II, through the documents produced and approved, provide such a huge opening to error/heresy.  It is a very thorough discussion but one too long to blog effectively]

……..

To put the preaching function of the priest before the sacramental [i.e., the sacrificial nature of the Mass] is a monstrosity in antithesis to religious realities. Yet simply to condemn that error in itself would be to miss its true significance; the intention of the Council in teaching this was to move the Church towards a protestant concept of the ministry, a doctrine that rejects the sacramental office of the priest and substitutes a ministry of the word.  That lead has been used by the modernists to promote an evangelical doctrine (in the sectarian sense of the word) that empties the priesthood of theological meaning. [by turning the priest into an educator, an administrator, a “presider,” and even a first among equals, sacramentally] 

Thus the constitution De Presbyterorum Ministerio et Vita [The Vatican II document on the priesthood] stands as one of the main contradictions to the notion that the documents of the Second Vatican Council, as its apologists like to argue, are of a faultlessly orthodox nature.  Its teaching is not traditional and was not intended to be traditional. With an ill-conceived aim of ecumenism, the Council allowed itself to be imposed on by those whose program was to diminish the Catholic theology of the priesthood.  The intentions of that party have been developed in practice, producing priests whose view of their office is in complete rejection of Catholic Doctrine.  When the Church comes to judge the Second Vatican Council in the light of true tradition, the constitution on the priesthood will be one of the documents that most call for disavowal and condemnation.  

———End Quote———

HJA Sire has now, 3/4 of the way through the book, shown glaring problems in several of the documents of Vatican II. As he notes, it is possible – though unbearably boring – to read large sections of Vatican II and find no problems at all.  But that’s like saying a serial killer is really just a nice, quiet guy, except for those 3 hours a month when he butchers someone.  It is meaningless. The problem in Vatican II is not with the orthodox majority, it is with the nebulous, problematic, and even erroneous majority.  Not perhaps erroneous by direct promotion of error, but by being so nebulous and so open to radical interpretation that it permitted – and almost demanded – radically modernist/heretical consequences to flow from the documents.

There is a tremendous amount of gold in Phoenix from the Ashes.  I am not done, yet, but it’s 97% awesomeness with occasional odd rants thrown in.  I guess we trads are not without our little foibles.

Consider the above possibly some useful information when confronted with individuals who insist that there is nothing wrong with the documents of Vatican II, but only their unorthodox interpretation.  Sire’s prime contention (similar to previous authors like Michael Davies, though Sire is much more forceful and to the point) is that the nebulous bits, and how to draw them out into formal error, radically changing the Church, were always intended by the modernists at Vatican II, and are inseparable from the documents as produced.  I am inclined to agree with him, for whatever that’s worth.  I think this is absolutely critical information to know, for the restoration of the Church must be based on a clear understanding of the ultimate source of the errors that have caused such devastation in the Church.