Confronted by self-deifying, modern man, Paul VI gave him a hug

In the blog entry, “The EU: consciously anti-God,” I wrote:

What, after all, is the EU but the political expression of the cult of secular man proclaimed by Pope Paul VI at the closing session of the Second Vatican Council in December 1965?

In response, Ortelio writes:

This is a vast misunderstanding of Paul VI, and a real injustice to him and his two main successors. Heaven knows, Paul VI, like the Council, was too optimistic about the Council’s likely effects. He very soon became vividly and audibly aware of its terrible side-effects in the life of the Church, and Professor Ratzinger’s similar understanding of the cultural and civilizational counterparts to the ecclesiastical disorders was in place by 1968. But if you read the whole of Paul VI’s homily, of which you quote a few sentences (and your linked article quotes a few more), you cannot fail to see that it utterly rejects a cult of secular man. It urges fidelity to the whole deposit of Catholic faith. It stresses again and again that the Council’s care for man—not secular man!—is for the sake of his salvation, a salvation understood in a completely theocentric way as inseparable from seeking first the Kingdom of God by desire to see and live in the three Persons in the one true God. I attach the whole sermon, and have bold-faced the many phrases and sentences which contradict the secularizing interpretation you put on it. Your reading of Gaudium et Spes 22 on divinization of human nature is also astray, as you can see by reading the section to its end; but I can leave that to another time

The EU is all you say it is, but it is not ratified by the theology of Vatican II or Paul VI, even though papal and Vatican diplomacy has gone along with the organization all too complacently. You can find plenty in the teachings of the Council, Paul VI and John Paul II on which to base a critique and rejection of the hubris and folly that shape and infect the EU and that, after it has wrought immense harm, will surely bring about its ruin and dissolution.

LA replies:

Thanks for sending the full version of the sermon. This shows that the text I have several times quoted over the years, which I got originally from Abbe George de Nante, The Catholic Counter Reformation in the XXth Century, August 15, 1997, p. 10, was an abridged version and left out context which somewhat softens the cult of man aspect of the homily.

However, I think the problematic aspects are still there. On one hand, it does seem to be true that the pope is putting this embrace of secular man much more in the context of Christian evangelism and Christian truth, rather than of embracing secular man for the sake of embracing secular man. On the the other hand, all that troublesome stuff about validating secular man is still there. And that’s the problem. You could say, “we reach out to modern man in the light of his true being and destiny as a son of God,” but the problem is, that sentence, like other liberal statements with a “conservative” qualifier added on to it, inevitably drops the qualifier, and becomes, “We reach out to modern man,” period.

Also Pope Paul VI makes what strikes me as a stunning mistake in this passage:

Secular humanism, revealing itself in its horrible anti-clerical reality has, in a certain sense, defied the council. The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who makes himself God. And what happened? Was there a clash, a battle, a condemnation? There could have been, but there was none. The old story of the Samaritan has been the model of the spirituality of the council. A feeling of boundless sympathy has permeated the whole of it. The attention of our council has been absorbed by the discovery of human needs (and these needs grow in proportion to the greatness which the son of the earth claims for himself). But we call upon those who term themselves modern humanists, and who have renounced the transcendent value of the highest realities, to give the council credit at least for one quality and to recognize our own new type of humanism: we, too, in fact, we more than any others, honor mankind.

The Council has met the “man who makes himself God.” And instead of condemning him, the Councl treats him as the Samaritan treated the wounded man by the wayside.

This strikes me as an appalling misreading of Scripture. The Samaritan treated an innocent, injured man who had been beaten up by highwaymen. The “man who makes himself God” is not a wounded, innocent person, he is a big-time sinner in rebellion against God. He’s not in need of bandages and comfort, he’s in need of being resisted and reproved.

For the pope to portray the “man who makes himself God” as a wounded person needing compassion rather than as a committed and powerful sinner needing to be rebuked is just wildly off-base. Most importantly, it supports what Fr. de Nante, and I echoing him, has accused the Council of doing: advancing an attitude of uncritical acceptance and embrace of secular man.

LA continues:

Also, the attitude I’ve just uncovered in the homily is indeed quintessentially “liberal”: seeing a sinner as a victim. Whether the authors of the homily consciously intended that meaning or not, modern liberalism’s entire moral inversion of reality, turning evil into good, is contained in that passage. When they portrayed the “man who makes himself God” as a victim in need of succor they inverted the traditional Christian moral order.

Ortelio replies:

No, sin is both rebellion and a wound to oneself (and often to others), and the application/extension of the parable to the wounds of sin corresponds to much in the most traditional Catholic spirituality of mercy and forgiveness. Paul VI says the Council, in a spirit of optimism, chose to emphasise—even one-sidedly—the healing of wounds rather than the correction of error and battle against rebellion. He hints more than once, in this very homily, that optimism is just that: an attitude, and emotion, not a stable component of faith’s clear-eyed understanding of reality. These were the days in early December 1965 when he unilaterally insisted on the insertion of conservative/realist correctives into the Council’s document on the modern world. The optimism, his own more tempered optimism included, was soon given a cold bath by reality. The Catholic faith requires that sin’s evil malice be kept as firmly in view as the healing of wounds by mercy’s enabling of and and response to repentance. The Council’s bad side-effects were not accidental. Its documents are in part unbalanced. But if you read them all you’ll conclude, I believe, that it didn’t embrace error or misread Scripture.

LA replies:

You write:

> The Council’s bad side-effects were not accidental. Its documents are in part unbalanced. But if you read them all you’ll conclude, I believe, that it didn’t embrace error or misread Scripture.

As a non-Catholic, this distinction gets too fine for me. If the documents are in part unbalanced, then its documents contained error.

Ortelio replies:

The distinction is no finer than is fitting for a big complex community of faith that is making its way through thousands of years of history. The documents don’t teach anything that is false, even when they are unbalanced by focussing on one set of truths and leaving others in shadow (but—and this is important—still undenied, and available in other valid documents of the Church’s teaching, in many cases in other documents of the same Council).

LA replies:

It is striking how often Ortelio admits that the pope and the Vatican Council made what they themselves came to view as serious mistakes in need of correction, yet Ortelio still disagrees with my statements that the Council made serious mistakes. If the pope thought that the way to respond to conscious demonic rebellion against God was by “healing the wounds” of the rebel, then the pope was a deluded “welfare-state”-type liberal, following the spirit of the Sixties. Also, if the pope came later to believe that what he said in his December 1965 homily was in error, why didn’t he issue a retraction, indeed, a retraction every bit as ringing as the original statement itself? Then there might have been a “counter-cult-of-man” declaration, and the Church would not now stand under the suspicion of promoting the cult of man.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 21, 2007 05:52 PM | Send