Madrid, Spain, Feb 9, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
In his acceptance speech for the honorary doctorate awarded him by the Catholic University of Valencia, Cardinal Kurt Koch rejected the extreme positions of progressives and traditionalists regarding the Second Vatican Council.
The prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity reflected in his address on the tension between the two essential parts of the Second Vatican Council: fidelity to the sources and fidelity to the signs of the times.
For the cardinal, “the relationship between these two dimensions has always characterized the Church, but the tension has become more acute in a new way after Vatican II.”
Faced with this dichotomy, Koch argued that “beyond secularist conformism and separatist fundamentalism, it is necessary to seek a third path in the Catholic faith, which has already been shown to us by the council.”
According to the prefect, both the so-called progressives and the traditionalists “conceive of Vatican II as a rupture, although in opposite ways.” For the former, the rupture occurred after the council, while the latter understand that it occurred during it.
In light of this, the cardinal considered that “the two extreme positions are so close, precisely because they do not interpret Vatican II within the general tradition of the Church.”
In his address, Koch recalled, with regard to the traditionalist view that focuses solely on the sources, that Pope Benedict XVI stated that “the magisterial authority of the Church cannot be frozen in 1962.”
The risk of worldliness in the Church
On the other hand, “if the emphasis is placed solely on ‘aggiornamento’ [updating], there is a danger that the opening of the Church to the world, desired and achieved by the council, will become a hasty adaptation of the foundations of faith to the spirit of the modern age,” the cardinal noted.
“Many currents in the postconciliar period were so oriented toward the world that they did not notice the tentacles of the modern spirit or underestimated its impact,” the cardinal observed, “so that the so-called conversion to the world did not cause the leaven of the Gospel to permeate modern society more but rather led to a broad conformism of the Church with the world.”
Koch’s proposal in the face of both positions, which he considers equally disruptive, is “the restoration of a healthy balance in the relationship between the faith and the Church on the one hand and the world on the other.”
In his view, if the Church cannot be confused with the world, “the original identity of faith and the Church must not be defined in such a way that it separates itself from the world in a fundamentalist way.”
In this sense, he added that the dialogue between the Church and the contemporary world “must not make faith and the Church adapt to the world in a secularist way, dangerously renouncing her identity.”
What does the reform of the Church mean?
For the prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, the reform of the Church cannot imply “a change of essence” but consists in “the elimination of what is inauthentic” through a process of purification of the Church “based on its origins,” so that “the form of the one Church willed by Christ can become visible again.”
“For the council, fidelity to its origins and conformity to the times were not opposed to each other. Rather, the council wanted to proclaim the Catholic faith in a way that was both faithful to its origins and appropriate to the times, in order to be able to transmit the truth and beauty of the faith to the people of today, so that they can understand it and accept it as an aid to their lives,” he emphasized.
For the cardinal, “the council did not create a new Church in rupture with tradition, nor did it conceive a different faith, but rather it aimed at a renewal of faith and a Church renewed on the basis of the spirit of the Christian message that has been revealed once and for all and transmitted in the living tradition of the Church.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Cdl Koch offers a balance between extremes, tradition and progressive radicalism. Our challenge is finding that virtuous mean. A mesmerization within the world’s spirit, worldliness, as distinguished from unwillingness to consider any improvement quoting Benedict XVI, who stated “the magisterial authority of the Church cannot be frozen in 1962.”
Most conservative are inclined to play it safe. If there are better approaches to spreading the faith than the theological basics of faith, hope and charity it’s difficult to identify them with comfort when the Church is under weathering a form of progressive information overload. Nevertheless, for the faithful Catholic [a variable concept] there is reason to give careful thought to ideas despite the source however questionable.
An example would be Pope Francis’ emphasis on a more compassionate rather than legalistic approach. Presently, illegal migration and refugee status as laid out by Archbishop Naumann is one, as evident in the inflexible backlash by apparent arch conservations.
An example is Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the virtuous mean. For example, a woman being attacked by a man. We’re morally obliged to protect the weak in such instances. We can be cowardly and do nothing. Or we react and take action to defend the woman. That intervention should not be deadly if at all possible, it should be proportional to the defense of the woman. Such a case regarding the coward is called defective. If the man seeking to protect the woman used deadly force when it wasn’t required it’s excessive. The virtuous mean, is taking the appropriate means proportionate to the defense of the woman. The extremes are sinful.
Civil law in trying cases of intervention, as with the former marine in the subway defense killing, found the defendant not guilty, as it should have. If anyone cannot follow the logic of the virtuous mean it’s likely a reflection of an interior disorder. That can be healed with humble acknowledgment and prayer.
For the further benefit of readers, extremes are either morally good or evil when the subject is itself an intrinsic good or evil. For example, marriage. An intrinsic good. We are either faithful and virtuous or unfaithful and sinful. There is no virtuous mean. False witness is an intrinsic evil. Again, there is no virtuous mean. These instances fall under the virtue Justice, which has no mean.
As regards migration and the law requiring legal migration, migration of itself is not an intrinsic evil. The law allows refugee status, political asylum, generally desperate circumstances and other like conditions. Nations may manage the law as they see fit, just application ultimately determined by divine law. It could be argued in the instance of Archbishop Naumann’s views for or against since the subject matter is not intrinsically evil. It becomes a matter of prudential judgment.
I recommend reading The Ratzinger Report. It says it all!
Revelation 3:15-16 in the Bible, where Jesus addresses the church in Laodicea, stating, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
Actually, the problem is not Vatican II. It is with the various interpretations of it that have caused so much squabble. For example, nowadays the powers that be are saying that the old Mass is not acceptable unless you have a FSSP parish while allowing far too many excesses in the Novus Ordo. The council did not invalidate the old Mass, but the current powers sure seem to want to do so. If only they would show the same zeal in fixing some of the uncalled-for practices in the new Mass, like outlawing kneeling to receive communion.
Yeah, thanks for weighing in, Cardinal Koch. Honestly, I could not care less about Vatican II. I am content to let the Holy Spirit and history sort out what that was all about. In the mean time, I will just go on supporting the SSPX, knowing that at least they will never embrace Pachamama.
The fact that progressives and conservatives point to the same documents of VII to justify their position should be enough for Catholics to push the hierarchy for clarity in the documents.
Yes, the document on the new mass calls for Latin to be preserved along with Gregorian chant, but the same document also calls for more vernacular language and contemporary music. This deliberate ambiguity whether about the mass or ecumenism needs to be cleared up so as to present the faith as it has always been believed.
I think the biggest rupture is through ecumenism. Is the Catholic Faith the One True Faith or just another logo on a coexist bumper sticker?
Asking that question of the members of the parish here they would all agree that Catholicism is the One True Faith though for some, many to most “God is Love” is the sum total of their faith, hope and trust which is objectively true though just not all of the Truth. John 3:16 is the sum total of what is shared in our weekly homilies to the exclusion of the balance of Scripture that suggests there is more to Scripture than John 3:16. The Year A readings from Sunday’s Year C would have been a shock but readily set aside in favor of some version of John 3:16 being shared from the pulpit Sunday.
We read: “the restoration of a healthy balance in the relationship between the faith and the Church on the one hand and the world on the other.”
A “balance,” meaning what. In 1987, the Anglican convert, Fr. George Rutler, said it this way:
“Even among orthodox Catholics, the fallout from dialecticism abounds: it helps explain the clerical tendency to reduce antithetical concepts to ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ labels [“the extreme positions of progressives and traditionalists”?]and then to synthesize them to a middle position, a bland philosophy. The clerical form of dialecticism is called the ‘pastoral’ approach; but there is little that is pastoral about it, if one knows what a shepherd is supposed to do” (George William Rutler, “Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-Modern Catholic,” Ignatius, 1987, p. 176).
So, yes truly, that, “the form of the one Church willed by Christ can become visible again.”
Cardinal Koch has been an agonizing disappointment despite moments when he appeared to offer something of credence. But then, that is the way it is these days for so many in ecclesial positions. Ecumenism has proved over fifty years to work but one way. Its virulent spawn, synodalism, has proved its mirror. Only uncritical supportive voices are provided an ear.
Koch should stick with teaching Jesus Christ, Incarnate Son of God, and dispense with the divisive political analyses. We need more churchmen among the leaders of the Catholic Church and fewer sociologists, psychologists, politicians, climatologists, environmentalists, globalists, economists, etc.
The virtuous mean applies to moral, not theological virtues. Doctrinal truth is not found in the middle of anything. Pope John Paul II presumably was not an extreme progressivist according to Cardinal Kurt Koch, but in the name of Vatican II he kissed Korans, and entered synagogues and mosques. Pope Benedict, also in the name of Vatican II, took part in a Lutheran service to celebrate five centuries since Luther’s birth, and preached that division was “our” fault. This is not a return to the origins of the Church as established by Christ, but a series of actions that can and do encourage indifferentism and relativism. Such actions were sternly denied by the Church before Vatican II, right back to it very origins. The post-Vatican II confusion is not “ressourcement” in the Fathers of the Church, but the entry of very mundane Enlightenment attitudes into the Church. The chaos will end when Vatican II is copiously footnoted so that it can only be interpreted as reaffirming the Church of all time, even as it existed immediately prior to it. The fact that Cardinal Koch has an opinion, every Cardinal has another, and every man and his dog yet another opinion of what this Council meant to do demonstrates that the blame for the present chaos must be laid at its feet.
The problem with the Council is not just contextual (a false “spirit”), but textual. Its texts, as they stand, seem to contradict long-standing Church teaching on the Church’s constitution (with the apparent invention of a separate, autonomous ordinary episcopal jurisdiction independent of the Pope’s), ecumenism, and religious liberty. Like the Council of Constance, which sowed confusion for forty years, till Rome got its act together again, the last one will not be the last word on itself; Rome will restore sanity when it becomes truly Roman again.