Council Remembrance

In his most recent Apostolic Letter, written to the Universal Church, entitled "The Door of Faith", ( words from the Acts of the Apostles 14:27), and dated October 11, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI said, "I have decided to announce a Year of Faith. It will begin on October 11, 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and it will end on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King, November 24, 2013. The starting date of October 11, 2012, also marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the "Catechism of the Catholic Church", a text promulgated by my Predecessor, Blessed John Paul II, with a view to illustrating for all the faithful the power and beauty of the faith."

The Holy Father has made it an important point of his pontifical teaching to emphasize, more than a few times in the past seven years, that the Second Vatican Council, which is a precious gift from God, the Holy Spirit, to Christ’s Catholic Church, had been subject sadly to serious misunderstanding and misinterpretation by people inside and outside the Church over the past half century. To correctly understand and interpret the Council one must use what the Pope calls "a hermeneutic of continuity" whenever reading what the Council did and intended to do. This is why he wrote in his Apostolic Letter: "It seemed to me that timing the launch of the Year of Faith to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council would provide a good opportunity to help people understand that the texts bequeathed by the Council Fathers, in the words of Blessed Pope John Paul II, have lost nothing of their value or brilliance. They need to be read correctly, to be widely known and taken to heart as important and normative texts of the Magisterium within the Church’s Tradition. I feel more than ever duty bound to point to the Council as the great grace bestowed on the Church in the twentieth century. There we can find a true compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning. I would also like to emphasize strongly what I had occasion to say concerning the Council a few months after my election as the Successor of Peter, namely, if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church."

Neither the Council Fathers nor anyone else in authority in the Catholic Church intended the Council to constitute any kind of break with the Church’s past or to discard her traditions, customs, and perennial teachings, but rather intended that sacred gathering to endow the Catholic Church, in the words of Blessed Pope John XXIII, with "greater spiritual riches and new energy" for the tasks that her Divine Founder, Jesus Christ, has commissioned her to carry out until He returns to earth at the end of time.

Pope Benedict XVI notes, "It is not the first time the Church has been called to celebrate a Year of Faith. My venerable Predecessor, the Servant of God, Pope Paul VI, announced one in 1967, to commemorate the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul on the 19th centenary of their supreme act of witness. He thought of it as a solemn moment for the whole Church to make an authentic and sincere profession of the same faith. Moreover, he wanted this to be confirmed in a way that was individual and collective, free and conscious, inward and outward, humble and frank. He thought that in this way the whole Church could reappropriate an exact knowledge of the faith, so as to reinvigorate it, purify it, confirm it, and confess it. The great upheavals of that year made even more evident the need for a celebration of this kind. It concluded with the "Credo of the People of God" (composed by Pope Paul VI himself) , intended to show how much the essential content that for centuries has formed the heritage of all believers needs to be confirmed, understood, and explored anew, so as to bear consistent witness in historical circumstances very different from those of the past."

In his opening address at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, Blessed Pope John XXIII said, "The greatest concern of this Ecumenical Council must be this, that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously." That Blessed Pope noted that "modern society is earmarked by a great material progress to which there is not a corresponding advance in the moral field. Hence, there is a weakening in the aspiration toward the values of the spirit. Hence, there exists an urge for an almost exclusive search for earthly pleasures, which progressive technology places with such ease within the reach of all. And, thus there is a completely new and disconcerting fact, the existence of a militant atheism which is active on the world level."

Pope Benedict XVI said, "We want this (coming) Year (of Faith) to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the faith in its fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope. It will also be a good opportunity to intensify the celebration of faith in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharist, which is the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed and also the source from which all its power flows. At the same time we make it our prayer that believers’ witness of life may grow in credibility. To rediscover the content of the faith that is professed, celebrated, lived, and prayed and to reflect on the act of faith is a task that every believer must make his own, especially in the course of this Year." Saint Thomas Aquinas remarked, "The infused light of the habit of faith discovers the meaning of the articles of the Creed, just as the mind’s natural power of abstraction discovers the first evidences of reason."

The Holy Father says, "In fact, there exists a profound unity between the act by which we believe and the content to which we give our assent. Saint Paul helps us to enter into this reality when he writes: ’Man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved’ (Romans 10:10). The heart indicates that the first act by which one comes to faith is God’s gift and the action of grace which acts and transforms the person deep within."

The First Vatican Council teaches, "Faith is that supernatural virtue by which, through the help of God and through the assistance of His grace, we believe what He has revealed to be true, not on account of the intrinsic truth perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself, the Revealer, Who can neither deceive nor be deceived." Saint Augustine of Hippo said, "There is no love without hope and no hope without love, and no hope nor love without faith." Blase Pascal wrote, "If we surrender everything to reason, our religion will lose all mystery and will lose the supernatural, but if we offend against the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous."