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Thursday, September 22, 2011

"Vatican II: Lost and Betrayed": by Giovanni Franzoni- A Benedictine Abbot, Catholic Theologian and Eyewitness to Vatican II

http://iglesiadescalza.blogspot.com/2011/09/vatican-ii-lost-and-betrayed.html
Giovanni Franzoni, a former Benedictine abbot, Catholic theologian, and eyewitness to Vatican II, offered these reflections at the 31st Congress of the Asociación de Teólogos y Teólogas Juan XXIII in Madrid earlier this month. They were reproduced in Spanish on Religión Digital.
..."Later, in 1967, Pope Montini published the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus in which he rejected any theory of change in the existing law. But everyone knows that since then and throughout these fifty years, the question of celibacy has caused endless debate, much discomfort, much suffering.I'll tell you a personal experience. When we learned of the pope's decision to reserve the decision on priestly celibacy to himself, a Colombian conciliar father who was very close to me, said to me in Italian: "Father Abbot, I have only eight diocesan priests, all with domestic partners. What should I do? Put them all out on the street and remain without any priests? I came to the Council for this reason alone .. " I, a "moderate", tried to calm him down, saying that I hoped the Holy Father would do his part ... If the pope had left full freedom to the Council, perhaps a breach would have been opened towards reform. But the pope decided, and the conciliar fathers didn't have the courage to insist, to maintain the freedom to discuss that thorny subject."
"Also on Gaudium et Spes, the Pope made an authoritarian intervention that had serious consequences. When the morally legitimate methods of birth control were being discussed, many fathers -- Suenens and Maximos IV, among others -- argued that spouses should be granted freedom of conscience, a thesis that was contradicted by fewer but more militant fathers. Determined to reaffirm Casti Connubii, the encyclical in which Pius XI in 1930 declared that impeding the normal process of procreation of a single conjugal act is a grave sin, the "conservative" fathers opposed through every means the announced openings and new developments. The "progressives" upheld -- "the pill" had been discovered shortly before -- that it wasn't wise to oppose science and issue judgments in such debatable fields. It seemed clear that the vast majority of the Council was in favor of the "open" thesis. Then Paul VI intervened, reserving to himself the determination of morally licit means to regulate fertility. He did it with the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which we will discuss later..".

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