As the Church is in the news and Cardinals and bishops clash, (if reports are to be believed) here’s a bit from the thought of Pope Paul Vl reflecting on Vatican II
Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father
affirms that he has a sense that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan
has entered the temple of God.” There is doubt, incertitude,
problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no
longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who
speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him
and ask him if he has the formula of true life. And we are not alert
to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula
of true life. Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by
windows that should have been open to the light. Science exists to
give us truths that do not separate from God, but make us seek him all
the more and celebrate him with greater intensity; instead, science
gives us criticism and doubt. Scientists are those who more
thoughtfully and more painfully exert their minds. But they end up
teaching us: “I don’t know, we don’t know, we cannot know.” The
school becomes the gymnasium of confusion and sometimes of absurd
contradictions. Progress is celebrated, only so that it can then be
demolished with revolutions that are more radical and more strange, so
as to negate everything that has been achieved, and to come away as
primitives after having so exalted the advances of the modern world.
This state of uncertainty even holds sway in the Church. There was
the belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for
the history of the Church. Instead, it is the arrival of a day of
clouds, of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty. We
preach ecumenism but we constantly separate ourselves from others. We
seek to dig abysses instead of filling them in.
In the next section the subject of the devil is further expounded upon:
How has this come about? The Pope entrusts one of his thoughts to
those who are present: that there has been an intervention of an
adverse power. Its name is the devil, this mysterious being that the
Letter of St. Peter also alludes to. So many times, furthermore, in
the Gospel, on the lips of Christ himself, the mention of this enemy of
men returns. The Holy Father observes, “We believe in something that
is preternatural that has come into the world precisely to disturb, to
suffocate the fruits of the Ecumenical Council, and to impede the
Church from breaking into the hymn of joy at having renewed in fullness
its awareness of itself. Precisely for this reason, we should wish to
be able, in this moment more than ever, to exercise the function God
assigned to Peter, to strengthen the Faith of the brothers. We should
wish to communicate to you this charism of certitude that the Lord
gives to him who represents him though unworthily on this earth.”
Faith gives us certitude, security, when it is based upon the Word of
God accepted and consented to with our very own reason and with our
very own human spirit. Whoever believes with simplicity, with
humility, sense that he is on the good road, that he has an interior
testimony that strengthens him in the difficult conquest of the truth.
Joann Nelander Studio 