Sunday 13 October 2013

Some interesting quotations

Following my last post on the introduction of the vernacular, I have been dipping into Michael Davies' book Pope John's Council, and have found some interesting quotations:

"The council documents themselves often implied more in the wayy of change than the council fathers were necessarily aware of when they voted." Dr McAfee Brown, a protestant observer at the council.

"I regret having voted in favour of the Council Constitution in whose name (but in what a manner!) this heretical pseudo-reform has been carried out, a triumph of arrogance and ignorance. If it were possible, I would take back my vote, and attest before a magistrate that my assent had been obtained through trickery." A prelate.

"In no other area is there a greater distance (and even formal opposition) between what the Council worked out and what we actually have... I now have the impression, and I am not alone, that those who took it upon themselves to apply (?) the Council's directives on this point have turned their backs deliberately on what Beauduin, Casel, and Pius Parsch had set out to do..." Fr Louis Bouyer of the pre-conciliar Liturgical Movement.

"Who dreamed on that day that within a few years, far less than a decade, the Latin past of the Church would be all but expunged, that it would be reduced to a memory fading in the middle distance? The thought of it would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous. So we laughed it off." Archbishop Dwyer.

Davies also quotes, in an appendix, an extract from Dom Guéranger's Liturgical Institutions. Dom Guéranger was the first abbot of Solesmes after the French Revolution, and a founder of the Liturgical Movement.  His words describe Protestant errors from the time of the Reformation on; but much of what he says is disturbingly prescient (he was writing in the 1830s).  The passages cited here largely coincide with those Michael Davies quotes. (NB I have no knowledge of the rest of that site, so that link is for information, not an endorsement of any kind).

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