Sunday, July 1, 2012

Fr. Barron on the Meaning of Vatican II



These characters and developments were very real for me in the 1960s during the Council.  The great theologians of that time continue in many cases to be the great theologians of our time, some even after their deaths.  This is a very helpful explanation of the forces or tendencies involved, how the "progressives" won out at the Council and later split into opposing tendencies, each with its own journal, Concilium and Communio.

I can't help being reminded of the struggle for orthodoxy, for development within a "hermeneutics of continuity," and the splits within Marxism and psychoanalysis (on the latter see Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time).  It is easy, but lazy, to look at these disputes with a kind of cynical or sentimental indifference - why can't they all just get along?  But the issues at stake were and are of immense importance to the future of the Church, as those splits within psychoanalysis and Marxism were for those traditions.

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