Marian Helper • Fall 2022 • Marian.org 21 text of history. For most of the three centuries prior to Vatican II, the Church dealt with the non-Catholic world by issuing warnings and condemnations against its apostasies and errors. For example, The Syllabus of Errors, issued by Pope Bl. Pius IX in 1864, and the encyclical Caritate Christi Compulsi by Pope Pius XI in 1932 “read the riot act” (so to speak) to the forces of radical secularism assuming control of the modern world at the time. It is easy to characterize such salvos by the Church’s hierarchy merely as “reactionary,” “judgmental,” or “counter-productive.” Authentic love and mercy, however, sometimes needs to take the form of “tough love.” In some circumstances, the most loving thing one can do for others is to warn them about the very real dangers they are running when they wander from the safety of the Catholic faith and embrace utopian political agendas instead (e.g. Masonic republicanism, communism, or fascism). A purely defensive attitude, however, is not the best way to win the world for Christ. How can the Church express a positive vision of her faith in a way that the modern world can hear it? — a central concern expressed by the bishops at the Council in the conciliar document Gaudium et spes, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” One of the ways they addressed that concern was to ask the faithful to consider: Is everything going on in the world today just darkness and error? The document Ad Gentes (“On the Missionary Activity of the Church,” no. 3) called upon us to remember the missionary strategy adopted by St. Paul on the Areopagus in Athens in Acts 17, where he began with the true insights already present in the writings of the pagan Greek philosophers and poets as a springboard for presenting them the greater light of the Gospel. Such a missionary strategy is not without its dangers, of course. We have to be careful not to compromise the Catholic faith, mixing it with elements foreign to what God has revealed to the Church that can only serve to distort it. Outside, not inside At the same time, from an honest look at human history since the coming of Christ, we can see that the impetus for clarifying and unfolding new insights (although these insights already are contained, at least implicitly, in the divinely revealed truth of the Catholic faith) sometimes arises first from outside of the boundaries of the visible Church, rather than from inside. Take, for example (as Vatican II itself did), the commitment to religious liberty for all. The Council recognized that freedom from coercion in matters of religious belief and practice is a fundamental human right, a right entirely in accord with the principles of Holy Scripture and the Catholic faith. Here Vatican II focused especially on the doctrine of the inherent dignity of the human person: Since all human beings are persons, made in the image of God — a truth also accessible to some extent to all human beings by the proper use of human reason — it is a violation of that dignity to force anyone to believe and act in violation of their conscience. The Council thereby scandalized some arch-traditionalist Catholics, who (wrongly) concluded that the Council document on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, contradicted previous, definitive teachings of the Church’s magisterium on the subject. Ironically, liberal-radical commentators (wrongly) seized upon this Council document as evidence that a principal goal of the Council was to “modernize” the Church, bringing it up to date and in line with contemporary, secular thinking. ‘Christify’ the world In an interview in 2012, however, Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron pointed out that according to SS. John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II, Vatican II was primarily a missionary council, not a modernization council. The true spirit of Vatican II was its goal of laying the groundwork for the new evangelization, embraced in a big way by the Marian Fathers and those others spreading Divine Mercy, especially online. Vatican II, Fr. Barron said, “wanted to ‘Christify’ the world [that is, to sanctify the world by bringing it to Christ] ... The trouble is, our generation, roughly speaking, got the ‘Let’s modernize the Church’ agenda. And it was a misreading of the council ... Paul VI, who was a Vatican II man in his bones, got that and, hence [his encyclical], Evangelii nuntiandi. John Paul II, who was a Vatican II man in his bones, got it and, hence, the new evangelization.” That is why, in the teachings of Vatican II, you find a fresh clarification, and new emphasis on the role of the laity — especially you, Marian Helpers — in bringing the Gospel to the world, sanctifying the arenas of work and family life with the Spirit of Christ. Vatican II also called attention to the needs of fallen away or alienated Catholics who simply have forgotten who they are — indeed, a world in which most people have lost any sense of their identity as imago dei, and their inherent dignity as creatures called to be sons and daughters of God in the fullest sense: redeemed and sanctified by the merciful love of Jesus Christ. Dr. Robert Stackpole is director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mw==