We have met them, And we are them!
One has to admire curmudgeons. Whether they’re the truly crusty ones as exemplified by Walter Brennan as “The Real McCoy,” or the blustery windbags like Archie Bunker. You can easily fall in love with them. Who didn’t love Art Carney as Harry making his elephant walk journey with cat Tonto in tow? Then comes….Horace Rumpole, or for that matter, any character Leo McKern’s ever inhabited. They can become a cottage industry, on the other hand, for good such as Ed Asner’s forlorn widower in “Up,” or as the ridiculous, scatological William Shatner character on “@#$% My Father Said” that is, if anything, a capitulation to Beavis/SouthPark consumerist zombies.Well, wake up and if you’ve never met this priest, you should now. Invite him into your daily routine as if he were Orson Welles coming to dinner and taking up residence in your bed.
The fetichising of Vatican II distracts attention from the real and significant and valuable actions of the Roman Magisterium, which deserve so very much better than the sneers directed at them by illiterate fools. Humanae vitae and Ordinatio sacerdotalis, slender volumes, are worth more than all the paper wasted at Vatican II. Documents of the CDF, keeping up with the errors proposed in areas of ethics by the World’s agenda, represent the locus to which perplexed modern Catholics should turn for teaching and guidance.
Read more at http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/councils-4.html
Perhaps more to the point for this blog, from Fr. Hunswicke:
"The proposition which I now have in mind is a little different: that Vatican II is History; that its relevance is Not For Our Time, fifty years later, any more than its relevance was for fifty years previously. Vatican II itself claimed to speak to the World of its own time: fair enough; that time was not our time, is not our time."
"Vatican II, like so many of its predecessor councils, is obsolete or, at the very least, obsolescent. It did not foresee the major problems of our age and, therefore, did not give us guidance for getting through them. Its silly optimisms are no more relevant to our very different, much harsher, age than is the proccupation of medieval councils with just-one-more-crusade."
But is this simply curmudgeonly? Isn’t it likely that a blue print written for a quite different and simpler time a half century ago may not be adequate for our own time?