Editorial: Betraying Vatican II (Jewish Daily Forward)

Rome, Jan 27, 2009 / 02:16 pm (CNA)

... The gesture of lifting the excommunication must be seen in light of the “conviction of the Council, an event inspired from on high,” the editorial stated. “The reform of the Council has not been completely implemented, but it is consolidated in such a way in the Catholic Church that it cannot enter into crisis over a magnanimous gesture of mercy, very much inspired in the new style of the Church desired by the Council that prefers the medicine of mercy to condemnation.”

The editorial goes on to point out that “the lifting of the excommunication that caused so many alarms does not end a painful path like that of the Lefebvrist schism. With this act the Pope clears the field of possible pretexts for infinite arguing, thus entering into the true problem: the full acceptance of the Magisterium, including obviously the Second Vatican Council. While it is true that the Catholic Church was not born at the Council, it is also true that the Church renewed by the Council is not another Church, but is the same Church of Christ, founded upon the Apostles, guaranteed by the successor of Peter and therefore a living part of the tradition. With the announcement of Pope John, tradition certainly did not disappear, but rather it continues today in the forms characteristic of a ministry and a Magisterium that have been updated by the great Council” ...

L’Osservatore Romano’s editorial concludes by addressing the issue of Bishop Richard Williamson’s recent statements about the Holocaust. Bishop Williamson, who was only brought back into communion with the Roman Catholic Church on January 25, made comments to a Swedish television station in which he said he did not believe that Jews were gassed to death by the Nazis.

After noting that the declaration “Nostra aetate” deplores “the hatred, persecution and all manifestations of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews of any time and by any person” and that this is “a teaching for Catholics that is not open to opinion,” L’Osservatore Romano said that the recent statements of denial by the British bishop “contradict this teaching and are therefore seriously grave and lamentable. Made known before the document lifting the excommunication, they are thus—as we have written—unacceptable.”

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=14903