Editor’s note: His Excellency’s Vatican II Reading Challenge can be found at his website here. The following pastoral letter was originally published on September 12th at his website here.
“GO AND REPAIR MY HOUSE, WHICH, AS YOU SEE, IS FALLING INTO RUIN”
Dear Sons and Daughters in Christ,
I know that some of you believe I have changed. Some fear that I have crossed over to “the other side.” Some wonder whether, after years of speaking plainly and courageously about the crisis in the Church, defending the traditional Roman liturgy, questioning what was done in the name of the Second Vatican Council, and speaking openly about Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, I am now retreating from those convictions. Some of you may even feel betrayed. So before I say anything else, I want to say this plainly: I have not moved.
The words Christ spoke to St. Francis at San Damiano – “Go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin” – have weighed heavily upon my heart.
I have not forgotten what happened to the Church. I have not forgotten what happened to the sacred liturgy, to Catholic catechesis, to religious life, to priestly formation, or to the transmission of the Faith. I have not forgotten the altars that were removed, the sanctuaries that were stripped, the Latin that disappeared, the sacred traditions that were discarded, or the generations of Catholics who were taught to regard much of their own inheritance as something from which the Church needed to be liberated.
I have not ceased to defend the traditional Roman liturgy. I have not ceased to believe that much was unnecessarily abandoned and must be restored. I have not ceased to believe that Sacred Scripture must be read within Sacred Tradition and according to the perennial Faith of the Church. I have not ceased to believe that no pope, council, bishop, priest, theologian, or generation possesses the authority to create a new Catholic Faith.
And I have not ceased to believe that serious questions remain concerning the Second Vatican Council and the enormous upheaval that followed it.
I have not become less willing to speak the truth. I am trying to speak it more precisely.
For many years, Catholics have often been presented with two explanations of the crisis. One says, “Vatican II caused all of this.” The other says, “There was nothing wrong with Vatican II; the problem was only its implementation.” I no longer believe that either answer, standing alone, is sufficient.
Something happened. Something happened to Catholic worship. Something happened to Catholic identity. Something happened to catechesis. Something happened to religious life and the priesthood. Something happened to the way Catholics understood Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, authority, evangelization, and even the Church herself. We cannot seriously deny this.
But after more than sixty years, it is no longer enough simply to point to the devastation and say, “There was a rupture.” We must determine where the rupture actually occurred.
Was it in the Council itself? Was it in particular passages of particular documents? Was it in ambiguities that opened the door to interpretations contrary to what the Church had previously taught? Was it in the commissions and reforms that followed? Was it in their implementation? Was it an ideology that appealed to the “spirit of Vatican II” even when the actual words of the Council said something different? Or did rupture occur at different levels, in different ways, and in different moments?
These questions are not a retreat from what I have said before. They are the necessary next step.
There is a time when courage requires a bishop to stand before a crisis and say, “Something has gone terribly wrong.” But eventually courage requires something more. A shepherd must walk into the wreckage and determine what went wrong, where it went wrong, how it went wrong, and what must now be repaired. That is what I am trying to do.
For too long, almost everything that happened to the Church after the Council has been placed into one box labeled “Vatican II.” I want to open the box. I want to know what the Council actually said. I want to know what it did not say. I want to know what happened afterward. I want to know what was done in its name. And I want to know where something departed from what the Church had received.
Pope Benedict XVI understood that the interpretation of Vatican II stood near the heart of the problem. In his address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, he contrasted what he called a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” with a “hermeneutic of reform,” of renewal within the continuity of the one Church given to us by Christ. That distinction is essential.
There was not one Catholic Church before the Council and another Catholic Church afterward. The Church did not begin again in 1962. Vatican II possessed no authority to invent a new Catholic Faith. No council possesses such authority.
Every council must stand within the Faith that preceded it: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the Fathers and Doctors, the previous councils, and the perennial Magisterium.
Benedict made this particularly clear during his efforts to heal the rupture involving the
Society of St. Pius X. He would not accept the idea that the teaching authority of the Church could simply be frozen at 1962. But neither would he allow Vatican II to be severed from everything that came before it. The roots cannot be cut away from the tree. That is an important principle for the work before us.
But I want to add something equally important: Continuity cannot merely be asserted. It must be demonstrated.
My principle is simple. If there is continuity, let us demonstrate it. If there is ambiguity, let us identify it. If there is rupture, let us locate it.
And if something truly cannot stand because it cannot be reconciled with the Faith the Church has received, then the Church must eventually have the courage to address it.
This brings me to a man whose name cannot easily be separated from this history: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. I have spoken favorably of Archbishop Lefebvre before. I do not withdraw those words. I believe history will judge this man and his role in the crisis of the Church very differently from the way he has often been judged.
Indeed, I have said that I believe it possible that the Church will one day recognize his sanctity. That judgment belongs to the Church, not to me. But I am permitted to recognize what I believe were extraordinary virtues in a bishop confronting circumstances few bishops in history have been required to face.
We should be cautious about sitting comfortably decades later and imaging that we can easily judge the conscience of a man standing in the middle of an ecclesial earthquake. Archbishop Lefebvre believed that something precious was in danger of being lost. He believed the Catholic priesthood was in danger. He believed the traditional Roman liturgy was in danger. He believed the transmission of the Faith was in danger. And he acted according to what he believed before God was his responsibility as a bishop.
Whatever judgment one makes concerning particular decisions he made, it is difficult to imagine the history of the traditional Roman liturgy during the last half-century without acknowledging the enormous role Archbishop Lefebvre and those associated with him played in preserving it.
There are moments when Providence raises a man to preserve something while almost everyone around him seems prepared to abandon it. Perhaps that was Archbishop Lefebvre’s particular calling. I am grateful that what might have been lost was preserved. But gratitude for another man’s vocation does not require me to believe that God has given me precisely the same one. His calling need not be my calling.
Perhaps Archbishop Lefebvre was called, in a moment of tremendous upheaval, to hold fast to a shore that seemed to be disappearing. Perhaps my responsibility in this hour is to help build a bridge from that shore. But let me say this – the bridge is not a compromise.
Let me be very clear about what I mean. I am not building a bridge between truth and error. There can be no compromise between Catholic truth and falsehood. I am not searching for a comfortable middle position between Tradition and modernism. I am not asking traditional Catholics to surrender what was handed down so that everyone can simply get along. That would not be unity.
The bridge I speak of is across something else: the wounds, suspicions, accusations, misunderstandings, and divisions that have separated Catholics for more than half a century.
On one shore are Catholics who watched much of their inheritance disappear and learned, often through painful experience, to distrust anyone who spoke favorably of Vatican II. On another are Catholics who were taught that fidelity to Vatican II required them to view much of what preceded it with suspicion. Both have inherited wounds. Both have inherited assumptions. And both need the truth.
The bridge cannot be built by pretending that nothing happened. It can only be built by discovering what actually happened. And that bridge must have a foundation. Its foundation must be Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Its pillars must be the perennial teaching of the Church. Its destination must be Jesus Christ.
If something cannot stand upon that foundation, then it cannot be carried across simply for the sake of reconciliation.
Some of you may be thinking: Reading Dei Verbum is one thing. Reading Sacrosanctum Concilium is one thing. But what will happen when we reach the difficult documents of Vatican II? That is a fair question. My answer is simple: We will read them too.
I am well aware that there are documents of the Council that present considerably more difficult questions concerning their relationship to previous Catholic teaching. We will not avoid them.
We will place them beside Sacred Scripture. We will place them beside Sacred Tradition. We will place them beside the Fathers and Doctors. We will place them beside the previous Magisterium.
And we will ask: Can this stand within the Faith the Church has always received?
If the answer is yes, we should say yes. If clarification is necessary, we should say so. If an apparent contradiction can be resolved by understanding a text correctly within Tradition, then let us demonstrate that. But if something cannot be reconciled, then we must not manufacture an artificial continuity simply because acknowledging the problem would be difficult.
We are not examining Tradition in the light of Vatican II. We are examining Vatican II in the light of Tradition. That makes all the difference.
None of us serving the Church today created the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. We did not write the conciliar documents. We did not oversee their implementation. We did not create the reforms that followed. We did not make many of the decisions whose consequences the Church still lives with today.
But a bishop cannot simply say: “I was not there.” I am here now. The Church I inherited is the Church I am responsible to shepherd.
A father who discovers serious damage to the family home does not say, “I did not cause it,” and walk away. His children live there. He must examine the foundation. He must discover which stones were removed. He must determine what was altered unnecessarily. He must identify anything introduced that does not belong. He must preserve what remains sound. He must restore what was lost. And he must repair what was broken. That is how I understand episcopal responsibility in this hour.
I did not create these wounds. But I am a bishop in the Church that bears them. Therefore, in some measure, they are now my responsibility. The bishops of today cannot indefinitely pass these questions to the bishops of tomorrow. At some point, someone must begin.
And to those of you who fear I have betrayed you, I know why you are cautious. Many of you suffered simply because you wanted what generations of Catholics before you had received without controversy. Some were mocked. Some were marginalized. Some were treated as disobedient because they loved the ancient liturgy. Some watched their children lose the Faith while being assured that the Church was experiencing a new springtime.
I will not ask you to pretend those things did not happen. I will not ask you to surrender Tradition in order to cross this bridge. I ask you instead: Bring Tradition with you. Bring Sacred Scripture. Bring the Fathers. Bring the Doctors. Bring the councils. Bring the encyclicals. Bring the catechisms. Bring St. Thomas. Bring the traditional Roman liturgy. Bring everything the Church handed down. We will need all of it.
And then let us examine what happened. If Vatican II stands with what came before it, we should have no fear of acknowledging that. If something done afterward contradicts what came before it, we should have no fear of acknowledging that either. And if we encounter something in the Council itself that cannot be reconciled with what came before it, we must not hide from that.
Truth has nothing to fear from examination.
And to those who defend the Council, I ask something of you as well. Do not treat serious questions as acts of disobedience. Do not answer evidence with slogans. Do not ask traditional Catholics to deny what they witnessed. Do not invoke Vatican II to justify something unless Vatican II actually said it.
If something precious was unnecessarily discarded, help restore it. If a reform exceeded what the Council called for, acknowledge it. If a conciliar formulation requires clarification in light of previous Catholic teaching, do not be afraid of that either.
And do not suppose that love for the Church requires us to pretend that the last sixty years have not revealed profound problems. The Church is not protected by our refusal to examine her wounds. The Church is protected by Jesus Christ.
Perhaps this is where Archbishop Lefebvre’s work and my own calling meet. Perhaps Providence required someone in an earlier generation to say: “I will not let this disappear.”
Perhaps Pope Benedict XVI was called to remind the Church that the answer could not lie in rupture, but in genuine reform within the continuity of the one Church. And perhaps those of us who serve as bishops now have inherited another part of that work.
Perhaps our responsibility is to go back. To examine. To distinguish. To recover. To correct. To restore. And to rebuild.
One generation may preserve the stones. Another may be called to rebuild the house. One generation may hold the shore. Another may be called to build the bridge. Those callings do not have to be enemies. One may depend upon the other.
You cannot restore what no one preserved. And you cannot build a bridge from a shore that has disappeared.
I honor those who held the shore. I honor those who suffered to preserve what had been handed down. I honor those who warned when warning was unpopular. But perhaps the hour has now come also to build.
And so I return to where I began. I have not moved.
I have not moved from Sacred Scripture. I have not moved from Sacred Tradition. I have not moved from the perennial Magisterium. I have not moved from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I have not moved from the Faith handed down from the Apostles. I have not moved from my conviction that the Church has suffered a profound crisis and that much of what was unnecessarily lost must be restored.
And I have not moved from my responsibility as a bishop to speak the truth clearly and courageously, whatever the cost.
But standing firm does not mean that the work is finished. There are questions that must be answered. There are wounds that must be healed. There are errors that must be corrected. There are treasures that must be recovered. There is a house that must be rebuilt. And there is a bridge that someone must be willing to walk upon.
I intend to walk onto that bridge. Not because I am uncertain about where I stand. Precisely because I know where I stand.
I will walk onto it carrying the Faith the Church has handed down. I will not surrender Catholic truth in order to make the bridge easier to cross. I will not manufacture continuity where continuity cannot be demonstrated. I will not defend what cannot stand merely because someone has attached the name of Vatican II to it. I will seek the truth wherever it leads.
And I will do so as a bishop who knows that one day I must stand before Jesus Christ and give an account for what was entrusted to me. That judgment matters more than the approval of either side.
So I ask you: Walk with me. Not toward a new Church. Not toward a compromised Church. Not toward a Church invented in the 1960’s. And not toward an imagined Church that can simply erase sixty years of history as though they never happened.
Walk with me toward the fullness of the Catholic Faith we have received. Let us preserve what is true. Let us recover what was lost. Let us identify what went wrong. Let us correct what cannot stand. Let us heal what has been wounded. And let us rebuild what has been broken.
Not with anger. Not with fear. Not as opposing camps. But as Catholics who love the Church enough to seek the truth about what happened to her.
The Church does not belong to us. She belongs to Jesus Christ. He has not abandoned her. And neither will we.
May the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, keep us faithful to her Divine Son. May Saints Peter and Paul strengthen us in the apostolic Faith. May St. Joseph, Protector of Holy Church, guard us in the work that lies ahead.
And may Almighty God grant us the wisdom to recognize the truth, the courage to defend it, the humility to correct what must be corrected, and the charity to rebuild together what has been wounded.
I have not moved.
But from the first ground of Sacred Tradition, I believe the time has come to begin the work of rebuilding.
Bishop Joseph E. Strickland
Bishop Emeritus