On the preparatory work for the Second Vatican Council

Here’s an interesting item from the “Out of the Past” column (a selection of brief articles from 100, fifty and twenty-five years ago) in yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly (apparently not yet available on-line):

50 Years Ago – Nobember 5, 1959

THE Vatican Secretary of State, His Eminence, Cardinal Tardini, tonight (October 30) told an unprecedented full-fledged press conference that at least three years’ preparatory work is needed for the forthcoming Ecumenical Council. He said the Council, the first “Summit” meeting of Catholic Church leaders from all over the world since 1870, will be held in St Peter’s Basilica in 1963 or 1964. More than 1000 bishops and religious are expected to attend. Observers from other religions including the Russian Orthodox Church may also be present. The press conference, an innovation of Pope John XXIII’s surprise-filled reign, was packed with more than 300 Italian and foreign correspondents, including at least two Russians.
[The Catholic Weekly, Vol. 68, No. 4492, November 1, 2009, p. 21]

Three years’ preparatory work, indeed. As we know, the Council discarded, in highly irregular circumstances, the meticulously-produced preparatory schemata shortly after its opening. The late Msgr. Lefebvre, who was involved in the production of those schemata (His late Grace worked in the Central Preparatory Commission, if I recall correctly), described them in glowing terms—impeccably Traditional documents in which the formulation of doctrine was updated for the needs of the time but without compromising its Catholic spirit, and copies of which he kept into late in his holy life. (I myself have read the preparatory schema on religious tolerance—a copy is contained as an appendix in the late Mr. Michael Davies’s fine The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty—and I can attest that it is an excellent statement of the Traditional doctrine in those matters). Instead, we got, well, the documents of Vatican II—the French Revolution in the Church: Religious Liberty, Collegial Equality, Ecumenical Fraternity, as Msgr. Lefebvre entitles a chapter in his Open Letter to Confused Catholics (and even Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged that the atmosphere at the Council was marked by a mood for absorbing into Catholic teaching the ‘best elements’ of the Enlightenment in, if I recall correctly, The Ratzinger Report—as though there can be anything in common between Christ and Belial, between the Deposit of Faith and the tenets of the French Revolution).

So despite having discarded many months of painstaking doctrinal work, the Council had gone on regardless! As Msgr. Lefebvre observed trenchantly in his Open Letter to Confused Catholics, what small business owner would carry on a meeting of his staff if the meeting’s agenda had to be discarded at the outset?! And so a fortiori one can only wonder at what the Pope and Council Fathers must have been thinking in deciding to continue, ad lib, with the Council. Indeed, it was a case of putting God to the test, and on an unprecedented scale. But God did not fail His Church; His protection of the Deposit of Faith consisted precisely in refusing to permit the teachings of Vatican II to be promulgated irreformably. Instead, we await—as the product, one hopes, of the S.S.P.X.-Vatican doctrinal discussions—the clarification of those parts of the documents which can be reconciled with Tradition, and the reform, in the manner of Pius XII correcting the teaching of the Council of Florence in his Apostolic Constitution Sacramentum Ordinis, of those parts which cannot.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
All Souls Day, A.D. 2009

Some (tentative) good news: pro-sodomite Administrative Decisions Tribunal ruling overturned, case to be re-examined

Today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph carried the following report (to which today’s CathNews also links), billed as an exclusive in the print edition:

Churches welcome gay bans

By Joe Hildebrand

The Daily Telegraph

November 02, 2009 12:01am

CHARITIES and religious groups could discriminate against gay people or anyone else who might offend their values after a landmark decision quashed a finding in favour of a gay couple who wanted to become foster parents.

[…] The couple were refused access to the Wesley Mission's foster care agency because they are homosexual.

They took their case to the Administrative Decisions Tribunal and were awarded $10,000 and the Wesley Mission told to change its practices so it didn't discriminate.

The charity appealed and a highly critical appeal panel overturned the decision and ordered the original tribunal to hear the case again.

The panel headed by Magistrate Nancy Hennessy even instructed the tribunal to this time take into consideration whether monogamous heterosexual couples are the norm for "Wesleyanism" and whether they might have had to reject the couple in order to preserve their beliefs and not offend people in their religion.
[…]
[http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26292177-421,00.html]

I describe this as “tentative” good news in my headline because of course we must now await the new verdict of the Administrative Decisions Tribunal (A.D.T.), but given what a strong rebuff the appeal panel’s decision poses to the original judgment one can only expect that the A.D.T. will have to rule in favour of Wesley Mission this time. This is good of itself, but there are a couple of other connections which Mr. Hildebrand failed to make, and which I will consider here:

1. Earlier in the year I reported, in several posts, on the N.S.W. Upper House Inquiry into same-sex adoption, and the appeal panel decision might have implications for its findings. In its Final Report, the Inquiry Committee “determined that the Adoption Act 2000 should be amended to allow same-sex couples to adopt, but that an exemption from the application of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 be created for faith-based adoption agencies” (Final Report, p. 10). Unfortunately, some “inquiry participants, however, informed the Committee that a recent 2008 decision of the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal put the matter into doubt” (Final Report, p. 124). (The “recent 2008 decision” is the one which, as Mr. Hildebrand reports, the appeal panel has now overturned.) This uncertainty induced the Committee to recommend

That included in any legislative amendment to allow same-sex couples to adopt should be an exemption for faith-based adoption agencies from the application of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 in relation to providing same-sex couples with adoption services.
[This is Recommendation 3.
Final Report, p. 130]

(I note, however, that the Committee decided that “[t]he exemption should not extend, directly or indirectly, to matters outside the Committee’s terms of reference, such as foster care services”, ibid.) Now that the motive inducing the Committee to make this recommendation is likely to cease to exist, I wonder whether the latest developments will influence Parliament’s response to the Committee’s recommendations, and if so then how. (I should point out, though, that Recommendation 4 advises

That, if an exemption from the application of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 is created for faith-based accredited adoption agencies in the provision of services to same-sex couples, the exemption should be linked to a statutory requirement that the agencies refer any same-sex couples who seek their services to another accredited adoption agency that will assist them.
[ibid.]

which, as the Committee notes, arguably “totally compromises the position upon which [adoption agencies opposed to same-sex adoption] relied upon the exemption in the first place” (ibid.), so the Sodomites’ League may well still come out of this the winner.)

2. Mr. Hildebrand reported that

The panel headed by Magistrate Nancy Hennessy even instructed the tribunal to this time take into consideration whether monogamous heterosexual couples are the norm for "Wesleyanism" and whether they might have had to reject the couple in order to preserve their beliefs and not offend people in their religion.

This is highly significant because, according to the same-sex adoption Inquiry Final Report,

The [Administrative Decisions] Tribunal rejected the argument put by Wesley Mission that the exemption in section 56 of the Anti-Discrimination Act applied to this situation. In making its determination, the Tribunal considered (among other matters) the meaning of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘doctrine’ and concluded that the belief that ‘monogamous heterosexual partnership within marriage is both the norm and ideal’ was not a ‘doctrine’ of Christianity so as to attract the exemption in section 56(d).
[p. 124]

So in the original decision we had a State judicial authority ruling what are or are not to be regarded as a given religion’s doctrines of faith and morals! This quasi-Caesaropapism was also evident in the recent Victorian ‘options paper’ which examined ways to curtail the freedom of religious bodies to hire employees based on prospective employees’ compatibility with the religious bodies’ respective beliefs, and was evident in a recent proposed European Union (E.U.) directive against discrimination and harassment (for more on both the Victorian and E.U. anti-discrimination moves , see here). The appeal panel’s decision to rebuke, at least implicitly (but nonetheless strongly, it would seem), the A.D.T. for the reasoning—the notion that the secular(ist) State is a better judge of a religion’s doctrines than the religion itself—underpinning its original judgment is a welcome (though only temporary, I fear) set-back for the secularist agenda.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
All Souls Day, A.D. 2009