(Joe Ferullo of NCRonline wrote an article on February 13, 2023 entitled “Pope Francis is redefining `the spirit of Vatican II'”. What he misses is that the Spirit of Vatican II is not from the Holy Spirit, but is a doctrinal weapon of mass destruction aimed at bringing the Church under the control of the plutocracy. This article is part two of a series published on 1Peter5.)
The Doctrinal Warfare Program Against the Catholic Church
By David Wemhoff
Part II: The Spirit of Vatican II As Not From the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit was the most important factor at the Vatican II Council insuring that error would not arise. The second most important factor at the Council was the American media, which was there to make sure that error preserved its rights.
Time magazine and the rest of the American media cast the Council as an American morality play. On one side were the liberals or progressives who sought to make the Church like America, which, after all, emerged as the leader of the Free World after World War II. These favored, among other things, American style social organization with the separation of church and state. These were the good guys and by their nature they were Americanists. On the other side, according to the American leadership, were reactionaries, conservatives, and authoritarians who favored the establishment of the Catholic religion and church in societies as the ideal, and sought to keep Catholic doctrine pure. These were the bad guys.
In the former category were prelates like Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York who got another “good guy,” John Courtney Murray, S.J., to the Council as his periti. In the latter category were prelates like Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office as well as priests such as Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R. and Msgr. Joseph Fenton.
By the end of the First Session in late 1962, the Council Fathers were bitterly complaining about the mis-characterization of the Council by the American press, and increasingly by the Catholic press. Some took to the airwaves and to print media to rebut the narrative being blared around the world. Msgr. Fenton was particularly incensed by Xavier Rhynne (the pseudonym of Redemptorist Francis X. Murphy) whose articles slanting the Council appeared in The New Yorker.[1]
Msgr. Fenton addressed the power of perceptions. Catholicism’s opponents were “the Communist papers of Italy…the professional anti-clerical press…And, as might have been expected, our own Time and Newsweek….”[2] He understood the kind of war waged on the Church. He wrote the “vigorous anti-Catholic press would still like to see the Catholic Church change its basic teaching and its fundamental attitude toward other religious organizations….” An effort was underway, he wrote, to claim “the Catholic Church might be said to be on the way towards a repudiation of the stand set forth in Lamentabili sane exitu, in the Pascendi dominici gregis, or in the Oath against the Errors of Modernism.”[3]
Pope John XXIII also weighed in concerning the attacks by the media with an address on January 27, 1963. Without lasting effect, he exhorted the Catholic press to “honor its special ministry, which is the exalted service of truth.”[4] As the year progressed, the Council Fathers undertook the task of fashioning a response to the American and other media. That response became known as the Decree on Social Communications, or Inter Mirifica, which was one of the first two documents to issue from the Vatican II Council on December 4, 1963.
That effort was met with fierce resistance from the American media and Americanists within the Church. John Cogley who was considered the “most prominent American Roman Catholic journalist of his generation”[5], Michael Novak, who replaced Robert Blair Kaiser as Time’s correspondent at the Council, and John Courtney Murray, SJ, led the attack. They were joined by Jean Danielou SJ, Fr. Jorge Mejia, and Redemptorist Fr. Bernard Haring, all of whom claimed that the document “seems to give the state…an authority over mass media which is dangerous to political liberty everywhere and which in some countries like the United States is proscribed by constitutional law.” The First Amendment to the US Constitution was invoked as the guide to the Church instead of Catholic Doctrine guiding the constitutional order of states. The protestors portrayed Inter Mirifica as a “classic example of how the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council failed to come to grips with the world around it.”[6]
That, of course, was not true. In section 6 of Inter Mirifica, the Council decreed one of Fr. Connell’s key positions in the battle against Murray and the Americanists: “The Council proclaims that all must accept the absolute primacy of the objective moral order. It alone is superior to and is capable of harmonizing all forms of human activity, not excepting art, no matter how noble in themselves. Only the moral order touches man in the totality of his being as God’s rational creature, called to a supernatural destiny. If the moral order is fully and faithfully observed, it leads man to full perfection and happiness.” [7]
The Decree set forth responsibilities for producers of news, media, and entertainment as well as journalists, writers and critics. All were to act out of a respect for the moral law.[8] Consumers of the social media have a duty to keep images and writings that may endanger faith and morals from entering their homes.[9] The Decree placed responsibility with the Church to form the faithful on the proper use of the media,[10] and of course in doing so required the obedience of the faithful. The civil authorities were to ensure “public morality and social progress are not gravely endangered through the misuses of the media.” This was to be done by “promulgating laws and tirelessly enforcing them.”[11]
The American media, especially the Catholic employees, were not deterred. Novak was one of them as he was an ambitious young author who tried to define the meaning of Catholic and American. He wrote of the spirit of the Council and by October, 1964, the phrase “spirit of Vatican II” appeared in Time magazine. That phrase has come to be associated with doctrinal corruption and it has been used to justify heterodoxy as well as severance of Catholics from their past and from each other.[12]
By the final session in Autumn, 1965, the forces were aligned to change Catholic doctrine on church and state. Richard Cardinal Cushing was anointed by Time to lead the charge with his troops being the US Bishops. Murray was the theologian who provided the rationale for doctrinal change. The US bishops were impressed by Murray and largely ignored Fr. Connell, but the document that ultimately became the Declaration on Religious Liberty, or Dignitatis Humanae, still had to undergo revisions before it was promulgated.[13]
The American leadership and their allies, the Americanists in the Church, did not get what they wanted. Dignitatis Humanae began with a clear statement that Church doctrine was not changed in relation to church and state[14] and it included important language such as “the highest norm of human life is the divine law,”[15] that Catholics are bound to put into effect the Faith in every aspect of their lives,[16] and it referenced the common good which was referenced elsewhere in Vatican II documents and has a definite meaning that includes society being built on the moral order.[17] In other words, Catholics are called to build Catholic societies and other religions are limited not only by public order but also by the common good.
Dignitatis Humanae came about in a certain context which included the running debates over the previous twenty years between Murray and Fr. Connell. The document, especially when taken in conjunction with other documents of the Council, was a repudiation of Murray’s position that a society need only follow a false view of the natural law. Liberal societies, of which America is one, were not held up as the ideal of social organization. This was a repudiation of the principles set forth in the First Amendment.[18]
It was not until the compilation of the Vatican II documents by Austin Flannery, OP in 1975 that a clear understanding of the meaning of the documents could start to emerge. Until then, true to their promise, a number of people to include the Americanists spun the documents to make the Church more like America. But, by then, a lot of damage had been done. The regimes in Spain and elsewhere suffered the loss of their greatest supporter, the Church, in the name of “religious liberty” and “the spirit of Vatican II.” The Constitutions of Portugal, Spain and Italy were all altered in the space of about a dozen years to remove the establishment of the Church and of the Faith.
After more than fifty years, the leadership of the Church is rousing itself. Intellectuals and independent researchers are discovering the harm caused by Liberalism and also helping to gain an understanding of what happened to the Church. It is inevitable that Catholicism’s doctrine on the proper organization of society will once again be clearly and loudly proclaimed from the Chair of St Peter and from the rooftops.
[1] David Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition (South Bend, Indiana, Wagon Wheel Press, 2022), Vol. II, 195-207.
[2] Joseph C Fenton, “Cardinal Ottaviani and the Council,” American Ecclesiastical Review 148, 1 (January 1963), 44.
[3] Fenton, “Cardinal Ottaviani and the Council,” American Ecclesiastical Review, 45-47.
[4]Anna Brady, “Behind the Press Scene at Vatican Council II”, The Long Island Catholic, Francis J Connell Papers, Redemptorist House Archives, Baltimore Province, Brooklyn, New York.
[5] Edward B. Fiske, “John Cogley Dies at 60: Expert on Catholicism,” March 30, 1976, The New York Times.
[6] Novak, The Open Church: Vatican II, Act II, 261-262.
[7] Inter Mirifica, section 6.
[8] Inter Mirifica, section 11.
[9] Inter Mirifica, Sections 9 and 10.
[10] Inter Mirifica, Section 4.
[11] Inter Mirifica, Section 12, paragraph 3.
[12] David Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition (South Bend, Indiana, Wagon Wheel Press, 2022), Vol. II, 279-281, 305-311.
[13] Ibid., 327-351.
[14] Dignitatis Humanae, Section 1, paragraph 3: “So…religious freedom…leaves intact the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ.”
[15] Dignitatis Humanae, Section 3, paragraph 1.
[16] Dignitatis Humanae, Section 10: “Consequently the principle of religious liberty contributes in no small way to the development of a situation in which men can without hindrance be invited to the Christian faith, embrace it of their own free will, and give it practical expression in every sphere of their lives.”
[17] Dignitatis Humanae, Section 6, paragraph 1: The common good is “the sum total of those conditions of social life which enable men to achieve a fuller measure of perfection with greater ease. It consists especially in safeguarding the rights and duties of the human person.”
[18] David Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition (South Bend, Indiana, Wagon Wheel Press, 2022), Vol. II, 361-373.