Second Vatican Council

You know, people are joining that to get away from Rome, to chop their way to something better than Rome.

People are going to SSPX to have something more pure, TLM to supposedly not be polluted by the Novus Ordo and Vatican II and Nostra Aetate and all of these things they imagine are the whole instead of maybe... partly true or maybe sometimes even exaggerated so i guess i'm just really concerned about this problem of our like you know submission i feel like it's the biggest failing of our age that we don't know how to submit to the church and what's your

question

when they make yeah i'm getting there when they make mistakes and so um do you see that as an issue because i guess that's what see what is an

Hi, this is Justin Hibbert, and you're listening to Why Catholic, my podcast about the what and why of Catholicism.

Today, we're continuing our series on Vatican II by reading chapter 6 of Lumen Gentium.

Remember that Lumen Gentium means light of the nations, and it's the dogmatic constitution of the Catholic Church.

It's one of the most important documents from the Second Vatican Council.

There were such fruitful vocations that all the tasks in a parish were done by priests and religious.

There may be exceptions, but one of the fruits of Vatican II was parish councils.

and lay employees, all who need, you know, healthcare benefits and all the rest of it, although maybe not sweet and, you know, universal healthcare there, but they still needed benefits and other things that cost money.

And there are a certain segment of people who are lay people who are extremely hostile to the old religion and the old expression of it in its form of worship and the traditional mass.

They need to be as political as the German bishops.

Well, the German bishops have gotten, have really gone off the deep end.

There have been a series of articles that have come out, two of which were published on the German bishops' news site, and one of which was published in Communio magazine, which is like one of the original hard progressive modernist, ultra modernist kind of theological papers, right? Communio, and this thing, this one goes back to Vatican II, right? That's how old this one is.

They published this bizarre story.

God revealed this to us so that we would read it and so that we would meet the one who's looking for us, as we talked about last week.

In all the documents that came out of Vatican II, there are four pivotal ones.

One of them is this one here that is on divine revelation.

It's known by its Latin title, Dei Verbum, or the Word of God.

A book is something impersonal.

A letter is a personal communication.

And as Vatican II says in the scriptures, our Father comes to meet his children.

However, it's not merely an interesting book.

And we've just felt it is so important that we need to have a reflection on how we conduct our liturgies in the Archdiocese of Johannesburg.

Are we being faithful to the Vatican documents, particularly Sacrosanctum Concilium, which was the first document of Vatican II? And so this morning has been dedicated to going back to that document as a source document and to see and to recognize the, the theological principles that underlie the liturgy, to become conscious of those, and to see how we are in fact living them in our own liturgies.

Speaking of Sacrosanctum Concilium, so we're looking at this after sixty years, and over these years, over this period, if we look at the popes that we've had, starting from Pope John Paul, he actually stressed the need for inculturation, that local communities should live, you know, liturgy according to their norms.

But how do local communities do that without injuring [chuckles] liturgy?

And so as a result of that, we have what you articulated is the experience of so many that once the priest walks in, that means he's sending me to the next place.

And since the Second Vatican Council, we've seen a shift in terms of when the availability of that sacrament will be there, not solely for when we're in danger of death or not solely— when death is imminent, but it's a little bit more, it's broadly spoken of.

So that is for the, and here's the core.

If I want everyone to remember this, the core of this is that when we are in the midst of our illness and we are in the midst of suffering, whether that's serious suffering, while death is not something that's immediately present as a possibility necessarily, or when we're at the close to the end of our life, The absolute first purpose of the sacrament is so that you and I would receive the grace to unite our sufferings to the passion and death of Jesus so that it may be salvific, not only for our souls, but for the welfare of the entire church.

far more captivated by these more ancient, serious, and I would say more zealous expressions of religion.

You know, one of the ones that's very palpable, of course, across North America right now is Islam, which we are seeing rise in the Western world as a whole, you know, and we're not going to get into all the stuff about Islam, but you're also seeing this in, with regards to Orthodox Judaism, you're seeing this with regards to pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, you're seeing this in Lutheran, within Lutheran churches, you're seeing this especially in Lutheran churches, so we're not, I wouldn't say that at St. John and Ascalusa we are an exceptionally high church, you know, sort of, we don't do incense, we don't chant the liturgy every Sunday, we do, you know, we kind of move between divine service settings, but we're going to probably be averaging a number of people in our service, which I didn't think was going to be possible when I first got here.

And our demographic at the church now is now shifted significantly to people under the age of 40.

And we have more young couples with kids showing up to put their babies under the tutelage of this congregation than I can explain.

But I think, number one, if you're going to be an apologist or if you're going to be a priest, if you're going to be a religious priest, or if you're going to be a mom or a dad, right? Whatever your vocation is, our first calling is to be saints.

You know, as the Vatican Council so prophetically put it in the decree on the laity, Vatican Council too, we are all called to be saints.

St. Paul Colossians chapter one, right? And that is our number one calling.

Our vocation is to be a saint.