Even before this, however, another meaningful occurrence which might
be very useful for the research I have suggested, should be mentioned. I quote from
the Spanish What's Up (Que Pasa?) magazine, Vol. VII, No. 363, of December 12,
1970:
The famous and “regretfully” octogenarian Cardinal Ottaviani does not
conceal his bitterness.
In its issue of Thursday, November 26, in three columns on the first and
second pages, The Messenger (It Messagero) from Rome, published a sensational
interview with His Eminence Alfred Cardinal Ottaviani. The report is accompanied
by a large photograph of this venerable prince of the Church. . . .
According to the Pope’s November 24 Motu Proprio, beginning next
January no eighty -year-old cardinal will be able to participate in the election
of the Pontiff. Presently, these persons amount to twenty-five. Among them is
saintly Cardinal Ottaviani, who celebrated his eightieth birthday on October 29, 1970.
Question: What does His Eminence think about this decision of Paul
VI?
Answer: More important than my personal opinion, which could be
deemed biased because of my age, I should like to convey the feelings of
canons, prelates, and even renowned hierarchs who are unaware of the
current problems of the Church. Undoubtedly they all are impressd by this
unusual and expeditious way of enacting this grave disruption in the high
ecclesiastical hierarchy. This radical change was implemented without
previous consultation with experts and specialists, at least to observe the
formalities to a certain extent.
Question: Why did Your Eminence say "unusual?” Perhaps because
no one expected such a big upsetting decision?
Answer: It is unusual that, through a Motu Proprio, without previous
advice, the pages of the constitution Vacante Sede Apostolica and those of
the Code of Canonical Law, which regulated the position of the cardinals,
both as to the cooperation they owe the Pontiff for the rule of the world
Church, and as to their most important ministry as top electors of the Head
of the Universal Church, are suppressed. This Motu Proprio then, is an act
of abolition of a multicentennial tradition. It rejects the practice followed
by all ecumenical councils. Regarding the age limit [the Most Eminent
Cardinal spoke calmly and composedly, without any sign of uneasiness],
should old age be respected, we would be able to sow the seed whose fruits
you yourselves would harvest. But here respect was laid aside. ... It is
precisely the motivation of age which the Motu Proprio invokes to justify
such a grave regulation. In fact, along the centuries, a principle was always
deemed immutable, namely, that old people are a firm safeguard of the
Church and its best advisors, for they are rich in experience, wisdom, and
doctrine. If, in a given case, these gifts were not present, it sufficed to
examine the circumstances concerning this particular person to determine
whether disease or mental disturbance made him inept, this check
belonging to skillful experts. In Holy Writ,” [the Most Eminent Cardinal
was astonishingly bright], "the value of age and the aged are often
mentioned. This shows how constructive are the cooperation and
guarantee of advanced age in the administration of holy things and in right
and efficient pastoral administration. In addition, let us not forget the
glory of Pontiffs, who, in their old age, enlightened the Church with their
wisdom and sanctity. Finally, when we cardinals are in our eighties, to our
credit is a curriculum vitae full of merits, experience, and doctrines at the
service of the Church. The Church cannot afford to lose these advantages
by accepting only the cooperation of younger and less-experienced people.
Question : Eminence, could not this discrimination of octogenarian
cardinals by chance affect the Pontiff himself someday?
Answer: Certainly, for the same criterion must be analogically
applied to the case of the sovereign Pontiff, be he an octogenarian or be his
acts questioned due to age.
Question : Finally, Eminence: What was your impression about this
decision of the Pope?
Answer: You will see. I felt flattered each time Paul VI, verbally or
in writing, called me u il mio maestro ” (“my master”), but now this act of
laying me aside completely is openly contradictory with his autographed
letter of October 29. In that, he congratulated me for my eightieth
birthday, using affectionate phrases and flattering felicitations for my long,
faithful, everyday services to the Church.
STATEMENTS BY CARDINAL TISSERANT
According to the November 27, 1970 issue of La Croix , 86-year-old
Cardinal Tisserant, who enjoys full mental clarity and excellent physical health,
answered questions on Italian Television (First Network). I quote La Croix:
Rarely had an interview attained such importance and contained such
interesting information. In just three minutes, the audience was informed about the
Pope’s critical health condition (“he had to be held up on the way out of his Wednesday
audience”), about the Cardinal’s excellent state of health, about Christ having founded
His Church under the form of a monarchic state , and about the collegiality of the
bishopric about which we have heard so much (“The more it is mentioned, the less it is
exercised”).
Apropos of Paul Vi’s decision to keep the election of the Pope in the hands
of less-than-80-year-old cardinals, Cardinal Tisserant said he did not know the grounds
thereof (though the Pontifical document stated them clearly), and that, undoubtedly, the
Pope wanted to please young people , since “now, everybody wants old people to disappear
Wednesday afternoon. Professor Alessandrini categorically denied the
Cardinal’s words regarding the Pope’s health condition.
SOME COMMENTS BY FATHER RAYMOND DULAC
When Fr. Raymond Dulac was asked his opinion of Paul Vi’s decision to
take away the right of voting in papal elections from cardinals 80 years and
older, he made these statements:
This decision taking away the right of voting in the papal election from a
whole category of cardinals, is an enormous decision. Until now, the most
important part of their function was this right. It commands and effects their
beheading in the most accurate sense of this word; they keep their hats, but their
heads are chopped off. This is what the ancient Romans called diminutio capitis,
a lessening or amputation of their civil rights and, of course, of their personality.
Let us not forget that the statute creating the cardinals’ right to elect the
Pope dates back to the year 1059; that during the arduous course of this
thousand-year period of history this rule was never questioned; that the
“impediment” of advanced age has never prevented the creation of a cardinal
or the continuing of a Pope once he became 80 years old, that it is contrary to the
Catholic spirit and the Roman Tradition to suspend a law supported by such a
time-honored custom without most grave reasons; and that this type of change,
affected by the Pope in 1970 in such a sudden, personal, and suspicious way, will
increase most people’s feelings of insecurity, instability, and the alienation which
has contributed to de-sacralizing the Church and loosening its customs.
Let us forget the inhuman, vain, vile aspects of this decision concerning
the age of men whose sacerdotal ordination had separated them from mortal mankind as
far as powers and dignities are concerned.
After this blow and all the others of the past five years designed to
naturalize and laicize the clergy, how could one have the heart to keep on telling the
ordained young priests: ”7u es sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech ?"
Priest for all eternity? Of what order? Not of the carnal Levitical tribe, but of the orde
r of that astonishing, unique, ageless personage, Melchisedech, whose mystery is
revealed in the Epistle to the Hebrews, verse 3 of Chapter 7: “Without father, without
mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but
likened unto the Son of God, continueth a priest forever.”
This all being over, today’s priest is just like an official who, in due course,
is “retired,” with a life pension, like a Swiss guard.
Since Paul VI, without much of a preamble, has nullified a millenary
legislation, it is important to know whether his Motu Proprio was not in fact, a
Motu alieno.
This most unusual act is an act of personal might on the part of a Pontiff
who, so far as others are concerned, keeps on covering himself with the curtain
of collegiality. We are sure this act has not been free. Should it be proven that it
was free, there will be no need to nullify this act; as a matter of right, it will be null and void
“For behold ... the Lord of hosts shall take away from Jerusalem, and
from Juda . . . the strong man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and
he cunning . . . and the ancient. The captain over fifty, and the
honourable . , . and the counsellor . . . And I will give children to be their princes, and , . .
the child shall make a tumult against the ancient ; and the base against the honourable
(Is. 3:1-5). He who is able to understand let him understand [italics
added].
This is Paul VI, living contradiction. On the one hand, he affirms; on the
other, he denies. Many times, without even preserving appearances, he destroys with
facts what he has built with words. Let the reader remember what the Pontiff wrote in
his brief to Cardinal Lercaro when the Cardinal was almost eighty years old, wishing
him a long life in the service of the Church. Then let him read the Motu Proprio, whereby
he deprives octogenarian cardinals of their legitimate rights on grounds of age, not because
of incapacity. Paul’s dialectics
are incomprehensible and plainly destructive.
Applying these dialectics, regulating our criteria by the principles of this
Motu Proprio , we must conclude that the octogenarian Pontiff, John XXIII, was an inep
t pope, and his council was no real council, because, according to Pope Montini, one’s
reason quits functioning when one is eighty years old, and one is no longer able to receive
the light of the Holy Ghost.
THE ARCHBISHOP OF GENOA , CARDINAL SIRI t SPEAKS
In order to decipher the enigma of the current Pontiff, I believe it to be
extremely important to quote the courageous statements of Cardinal Siri,
Archbishop of Genoa. He did not speak directly about Paul VI, but I believe that what he
said can be applied to Pope Montini:
1. Opinions Replace Truth .
In this world the first and fundamental doctrine of power consists of an
affirmation that there is no truth. Saint Augustine said that the difference
between the city of this world and the city of God consists of the former having a
thousand opinions, while the latter has only one truth. The basic difference between both
cities, therefore, is not based on the content, but on the very existence of truth. It suffices
to remember the dramatic dialogue between Jesus and Pilate.
What is most grave is that there is a technique to replace truth by opinions.
This technique exists and is very useful. It suffices to look at present religious, literary, and
philosophical productions. Opinions can be so cautiously expressed that it is impossible
to get to know what the author’s thesis is, or even more paradoxical, doctrines that are
e mutually contradictory are juxtaposed as if they
were consistent.
Let us look at the words, “God is dead.’ 1 If the slogan were denial ,
everybody would be able to understand. However, here we have a subtly
sophisticated idea through which “theologians” want to convey the deceitful impression
they are preserving the most assayed and chemically pure idea of God . . . through its “
identification” with the most profound reality of man.
Even the ambiguous terms “conservative” and “progressive” conceal the
relativistic technique, which leads every doctrinal issue in the direction of right wing and
left wing. Thus everything becomes relative; everything becomes a matter of opinions
and an instrument of power. Relativity of truth and doctrine is the actual goal of these
arbitrary developments of the Church’s present problems.
Is not this measure, proclaimed even by bishops and cardinals among us,
absurd and most unjust, as if it were an ideal to place us halfway between truth and error?
2. Is Gnosis Reappearing?
[To name the current errors in the Church, one speaks about a new
Modernism and also the Protestantization of the Church, but the Archbishop of Genoa
prefers to use the term Gnosis.]
Let it be remembered that Gnosis, with its appeal to science and higher
speculation, with its eagerness to understand mystery and to naturalize the Faith, was,
during
the second century, perhaps the worst danger in all the history of the Church. I
believe that the complex of errors circulating today can be called Gnosis , systematically speaking. But ... do many people know what they are talking about? This is terrible, but they do not!
One does not act on rational grounds, but on one’s excessive desire to
adapt oneself to the world. Worldly power, however, has its own philosophy, and fashionable theologians translate fashionable opinions into theological language, not because they accept a doctrine as such, but because they accept these doctrines that flatter the powers of this world.
The present times are grave, not because it is no longer a question of
opposition or contrast between truth and error, but between truth and non-truth, between the order of truth and the dictatorship of public opinion. People believe they are free because this appears in juridical texts; as a matter of fact, this deceiving belief is evidence of their servitude.
Is the Church also under the despotism of public opinion? Perhaps not the
Church, but certainly many people within the Church are. The Church could not be
deprived of its freedom without the Holy Spirit’s provoking powerful reactions. . . .
The altercation around the Council was not intended by John XXIII, who
suffered profoundly as a result of it; of this I am a personal witness. The real
Christian greatness of John XXIII consisted of the serene Christian manner by
which he humbly accepted his cross up until his death, fully realizing the tremendous
gravity of the problems.
3. What is Most Urgent?
The most urgent work is to restore the distinction between truth and error
in the Church. We have reached a point where any exercise of ecclesiastical
authority is considered an abuse of freedom, as if authority were a denial of
freedom! A thousand illegitimate powers severely and systematically curtail the
conscience and liberty of people at a superficial level, while at the deepest level
they detach them from the truth contained in the sources of revelation and
Magisterium, I hope that just and authorized distinctions will be forthcoming.
Pastoral authority is no art of compromise and concession, but the art of saving souls through the truth.
This truth is many times obscured by abusive liturgical deformations.
Today dangerous losses are discovered in the essential. Not only is the rite
sacred, but also the presence in the rite of the meaningful reality. Once the rite
is mythologized the meaning of its contents is lost. No wonder that the Eucharist
becomes for some a mere feast of human unity where God is just a spectator. This
is no longer heresy, but apostasy.
Right. The present situation in the Church is one of the most grave in its
history, for this time the challenge does not come from outer persecution, but f
rom inner perversion. This is very grave. But the gates of Hell will not prevail.
