Vatican City, Jun 3, 2010 / 19:31 pm
The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Roman (LOR) published an article this week on a meeting of the international theological and cultural review "Communio," which was founded 38 years ago by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger. The text highlights the Holy Father's perspective on the Second Vatican Council, its importance in the history of the Church in continuity with tradition and the concept of the ecclesiology of "communion" as it relates to "mission."
Today, notes the article's author theology professor Erio Castellucci, we have two hermeneutics—keys to its interpretation and application—which resulted from Vatican II. “They were defined by the Holy Father in his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia as those 'of discontinuity and rupture' and of 'reform, renewal and continuity.'"
Castelluci recalls that on the occasion, Pope Benedict "took a position flatly in favor of the second."
The first hermeneutic, explained the Holy Father at the time, "risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless.”