Is this why Jesus spoke so as to make sure that the least of his little ones could understand what the wise of this world could not? Give me a break. If councils and popes are going to teach, they need to speak clearly. It is one of the first principles of good teaching and it is necessary if doctrines are to be accepted as binding. But this is not what modernists do--they obscure, converting what has always been believed to something different by speaking in ambiguities. The Pope in an encyclical talks about "man" being the "path the Church must take". Not Jesus, but "man". This is a new Teilhardian-sounding doctrine. It has nothing to do with Jesus as the Way, nor with anything ever taught before by the Church. Yet he doesn't clarify, he doesn't explain who this generic "man" is. Apparently he means everybody, animists, Buddhists, whoever. But he doesn't elaborate or define anything precisely. He just offers our altars to everybody and prays with animists to make his point. If somebody like the Archbishop complains--he somehow has been too stupid or evil to understand this new, but unspecified Tradition!
The Pope talks about the Council's having been in continuity with Tradition. But he admits that this is so hard to imagine, given the revolutionary nature of what has followed, that experts must find ways to show that this is really so. This in itself makes a mockery of Tradition which is something transmitted by the Church through time into the present. If there has been any doctrinal change, the change must spring out of what has already been believed in the past and must be recognized as belonging to it; the present doctrine can never be in flagrant opposition to its own past teachings. Yet the Pope goes around pushing his exaggerated ecumenism in exactly the ways condemned by previous pontiffs and in ways that would have scandalized the Church from its earliest days going back to the apostles. He doesn't explain this so-called development of his. Instead he uses the idea of development itself to give cover to what are actually novelties. Every now and then he will throw a sop to the faithful by means of an orthodox encyclical. But his behavior counters much of what he writes.
In fact, what he does is simply pull rank. He is making claims for the Church's "living Magisterium" precisely because it opposes the Magisterium of the past. In effect he is saying authority can do whatever it wants to do and require the faithful to believe whatever it wants them to believe. He is saying it can throw over inherited traditions and invent new ones--all in the name of an unspecified doctrinal "development" that is too difficult to understand except by the experts--all modernists, of course. To which true Catholics should respond, "Like hell it can!" The pope and councils can no more invent a new Tradition than make pigs fly. They can only inherit Tradition--it is something already there, handed-down for their protection. The Pope, moreover, is as bound to Tradition as the rest of us simply because Tradition is the Church's own history of faith. It is by definition never new, but derived from the apostles. But the Pope says just the opposite! He is claiming the revolution is traditional by virtue of his own authority. This is sheer nonsense. It makes him Lord of the faith itself, not its servant and guardian. It is his duty to guard the treasury of faith, not wreck it and build it anew.
Thanks, UR. You express my concerns as posted in #461. I have to agree with you.
No, ultima, he isn't. That's just your distorted understanding. Again: we are talking about religious liberty here - where is the contradiction? It doesn't exist - Msgr. Lefebvre misunderstood the previous texts and ignored Pius XII's teaching in "Ci Riesce":
Could it be that in certain circumstances He would not give men any mandate, would not impose any duty, and would not even communicate the right to impede or to repress what is erroneous and false? A look at things as they are gives an affirmative answer.
You continuously attribute errors condemned by the Council and the post-conciliar teaching to the Magisterium, absurdly claiming that the Pope truly supports them even as he condemns them with the "sop" of an "orthodox encyclical".
Remember, Msgr. Lefebvre began his campaign of defiance under Paul VI, who never held an Assisi event - the catholic doctrine on religious liberty is what he was opposed to - that and communion in the hand. And hence the seminarians were taught to entirely reject Vatican II which "derives from heresy and ends in heresy" - how could the Pope allow such a thing?
The Pope in an encyclical talks about "man" being the "path the Church must take". Not Jesus, but "man". This is a new Teilhardian-sounding doctrine. It has nothing to do with Jesus as the Way, nor with anything ever taught before by the Church.
You simply don't understand the Pope.
THE REDEEMER OF MAN, Jesus Christ, is the centre of the universe and of history ... The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption and with the power of the love that is radiated by that truth ... Jesus Christ is the chief way for the Church. (John Paul II, "Redemptor Hominis")
What about "man"?
... this man is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission: he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption.
All he is saying is that the Church exists for "this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ".