Sandro Magister, the Italian church watcher at L’Esspresso has an interesting article about calls for a “New Syllabus for the 21st Century.” The heart of the argument is a speech by Anthanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Karaganda in Kazakhstan. The following is a central premise:
In recent decades there existed, and still exist today, groupings within the Church that are perpetrating an enormous abuse of the pastoral character of the Council and its texts, written according to this pastoral intention, since the Council did not want to present its own definitive or unalterable teachings. From the same pastoral nature of the texts of the Council, it can be seen that its texts are in principle open to supplementation and to further doctrinal clarifications. Keeping in mind the now decades-long experience of interpretations that are doctrinally and pastorally mistaken and contrary to the bimillennial continuity of the doctrine and prayer of the faith, there thus arises the necessity and urgency of a specific and authoritative intervention of the pontifical magisterium for an authentic interpretation of the conciliar texts, with supplementation and doctrinal clarifications; a sort of “Syllabus” of the errors in the interpretation of Vatican Council II.
There is the need for a new Syllabus, this time directed not so much against the errors coming from outside of the Church, but against the errors circulated within the Church by supporters of the thesis of discontinuity and rupture, with its doctrinal, liturgical, and pastoral application.
The syllabus refers, of course, to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, an appendix to his encyclical Quanta Cura. This document consists of 80 Propositions drawn from various papal documents—encyclicals, letters, exhortations addressed to specific bishops’ conferences, etc. A few point to serious philosophical disagreements with 19th century liberalism and the secular Enlightenment, others sound quaint, and a few just sound silly given current understandings about Church/State relations. For example, I think no one takes seriously Proposition 77:
In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.
The Syllabus was controversial when released, often ignored in America (leading to charges of “Americanism”) and often defended by claiming that each proposition is not to be understood as categorical, but must be interpreted historically and in context. I find this a weak defense, since it really ignores the structure of the document, which really does seem to be laying out each proposition as definitive statement to be categorically rejected by the faithful. It is worth noting that Cardinal Ratzinger at one point referred to Gaudium et Spes as a “Counter Syllabus“, suggesting that if Vatican II did not repudiate the Syllabus, it changed the terms of the debate to such a degree that the syllabus was effectively superseded.
So given this context, how are we to interpret the calls for a “new Syllabus” to correct the “errors of interpretation” of Vatican II? I realize that in recent years the battle between the “hermeneutic of continuity” vs. the “hermeneutic of rupture” have gotten heated, though it seems to me that there is some truth in both. By framing the debate in terms of the syllabus, the author and his supporters seem to be giving credence to the original syllabus of errors and calling for a similar rejection of modernity. (Not theories of “modernism” however that is defined, but the fact of modernity. I am indebted to the above quote from Ratzinger for this description.)
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