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Let your speech be “yes, yes: no, no”; whatever is beyond these comes from the evil one . (mt . 5:37)

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January 2010

Reprint #90

PART 2

ON THE LIVING MAGISTERIUM
AND
LIVING
TRADITION:
Towards a “Thomistic Reception” of Vatican II
Part II:
the Speech of December 22, 2005
[Having concluded that the teachings of the Second Vatican Council do not constitute an act of
the magisterium] a new question arises: Did Pope Benedict XVI, in particular in his famous Address
of December 22, 2005, express his intention to rectify and correct the teachings of Vatican II so
as to understand them in the sense of a continuity with respect to antecedent Catholic Tradition?
In another document, his Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church dated March 10, 2009,
didn’t the Pope say, addressing “some of those who put themselves forward as great defenders of
the Council” that “Vatican II embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church,” and that “[a]
nyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries,
and cannot sever the roots from which the tree draws its life.”1 There is a fairly clear allusion to
1

Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church Concerning the Remission of the Excommunication of the Four Bishops Consecrated
by Archbishop Lefebvre, on line at www.vatican.va.
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the “hermeneutic of rupture” which the Pope
denounced at the outset of his pontificate.2 “The
hermeneutic of discontinuity,” he said, “risks
ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church
and the post-conciliar Church.” In this distorted
perspective, the Pope says, the nature of a council
is misunderstood: “It is considered as a sort of
constituent that eliminates an old constitution and
creates a new one.”

A. Benedict XVI and the
“Hermeneutic of Reform”
Benedict XVI counters the hermeneutic of
rupture with what he calls “the hermeneutic of
reform,” which corresponds to the initial intention
clearly expressed by John XXIII during the opening
of the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962,
when he said that the Council
wishes to transmit the doctrine pure and integral, without any
attenuation or distortion….Our duty is not only to guard this
precious treasure…but to dedicate ourselves with an earnest
will and without fear to that work which our era demands
of us….
…But from the renewed, serene, and tranquil adherence to all the teaching of the Church in its entirety and
preciseness…the Christian, Catholic, and apostolic spirit of
the whole world expects a step forward toward a doctrinal
penetration and a formation of consciousness in faithful and
perfect conformity to the authentic doctrine, which, however,
should be studied and expounded through the methods of
research and through the literary forms of modern thought.
The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith
is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.
And it is the latter that must be taken into great consideration
with patience if necessary, everything being measured in the
forms and proportions of a magisterium which is predominantly pastoral in character.3

Benedict XVI comments that, in order to respond
to the program Pope John XXIII proposed, the
Second Vatican Council had to accomplish “the
synthesis of fidelity and dynamic.”4 The hermeneutic
of reform corresponds to a “commitment to
expressing a specific truth in a new way,” requiring
“new thinking on this truth and a new and vital
relationship with it.”5 The truth had to be presented
by taking into consideration “the methods of research
and…the literary forms of modern thought.” In
the eyes of Benedict XVI, Vatican II thus intended
Benedict XVI, Allocution to the Roman Curia Offering Them His Christmas
Greetings, 22 December 2005, on line at www.vatican.va. All quotations from
the document are taken from the official English version.
3
John XXIII, “Pope John’s Opening Speech to the Council,” The Documents
of Vatican II with Notes and Comments by Catholic, Protest, and Orthodox
Authorities, ed. Walter M. Abbott, S.J. et al. (New York: The American Press,
1966), p. 715.
4
Christmas Allocution of December 22, 2005.
5
Ibid.
2

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to inaugurate a new stage in the relationship that
ought to exist between faith and human thought.
This relationship should, in effect, evolve according
to the dictates of history, for the Faith must seek to
be expressed in a manner adapted to contemporary
thought. The Second Vatican Council was to the
modern thought that issued from the 18th century
what St. Thomas was to the Aristotelian philosophy
of the 13th century. The intention of the Council
was indeed to propose the truths of faith in terms of
modern thought and thus to be reconciled with it. As
St. Thomas did in the 13th century, it was necessary
to “set faith in a positive relationship with the form of
reason prevalent in his time.”6

B. The Council’s Actual Intention
The task of Vatican II was “to determine in a
new way the relationship between the Church and
the modern era.”7 This relationship had become
“somewhat stormy”:
In the 19th century under Pius IX, the clash between the
Church’s faith and a radical liberalism and the natural sciences, which also claimed to embrace with their knowledge
the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make
the ‘hypothesis of God’ superfluous, had elicited from the
Church a bitter and radical condemnation of this spirit of the
modern age. Thus, it seemed that there was no longer any
milieu open to a positive and fruitful understanding, and the
rejection by those who felt they were the representatives of
the modern era was also drastic.8

The Syllabus of 1864 is like the quintessence of
this opposition. But with the Pastoral Constitution
Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council wished
to take the opposite view from what the Syllabus
taught, and to inaugurate a new type of relationship
with the modern era. In his book Principles of Catholic
Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology,
published in 1982, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated
that the fundamental intention of Vatican Council
II is contained in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium
et Spes. A section of the epilogue is entitled “The
question of the proper reception of Vatican Council
II.” In it, the [then] Prefect of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith stated:
If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text as a whole,
we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious
liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of
Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus…the Syllabus established
a line of demarcation against the determining forces of the
nineteenth century: against the scientific and political world
view of liberalism. In the struggle against modernism this
twofold delimitation was ratified and strengthened….the
one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under
Pius IX and Pius X in response to the situation created by
the new phase of history inaugurated by the French Revolution was, to a large extent, corrected via facti, especially in
6
7
8

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

THE ANGELUS • January 2010 www.angeluspress.org

Central Europe, but there was still no basic statement of the
relationship that should exist between the Church and the
world that had come into existence after 1789.9

Twenty-three years later, in a lecture that took
place at Subiaco when he received the St. Benedict
Award for the promotion of life and the family in
Europe, on Friday, April 1, 2005, the day before
the death of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger
explained the Council’s intention in greater depth.
The Council wished to effect the adaptation of the
truths of the Church to the thought of the Age of
Enlightenment and of the French Revolution of
1789. Enlightenment thought acknowledges religious
values without confounding them with the world
and its profane values; it thus makes possible a
conciliation of Christianity and modern thought,
in a manner different from that achieved in the
Middle Ages and the period before 1789, because it
accepts in principle the absolute rights of freedom.
Such is the new modern mentality which calls for
another type of relationship with the Church. “In
the pastoral constitution, On the Church in the
Modern World, Vatican Council II underlined again
this profound correspondence between Christianity
and the Enlightenment, seeking to come to a true
conciliation between the Church and modernity,
which is the great heritage that both sides must
defend.”10

C. Rupture or Continuity?
In the eyes of Benedict XVI, the initial intention
of the Second Vatican Council does not imply any
rupture or discontinuity. By proposing the Faith in
such a way as to place it in a positive relationship
with modern thought as it developed from the
Enlightenment and the 18th century, the Council
intended to accomplish “the synthesis of fidelity
and dynamic.” This is the central idea of the 2005
speech, which completes the development of
Ratzinger’s reflections on this point over the years
1982-2005. “It is precisely in this combination of
continuity and discontinuity at different levels that
the very nature of true reform consists.”11 Vatican
II could present itself as a sort of countersyllabus
without effecting a discontinuity or rupture with
the teaching of Pius IX; and this can be explained
because, Benedict XVI tells us, the decisions
the Church makes in a contingent domain are
themselves contingent:
In this process of innovation in continuity we must
learn to understand more practically than before that the

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (1982; San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp.381-2.
10
“Cardinal Ratzinger on Europe’s Crisis of Culture,” July 27, 2005, www.
zenit.org/article-13687?l=english. The complete article in English is posted
at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/politics/pg0143.html.
11
Christmas Allocution, December 22, 2005.
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Church’s decisions on contingent matters–for example,
certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation
of the Bible–should necessarily be contingent themselves,
precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is
changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize
that in these decisions it is only the principles that express
the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within. On the other hand,
not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on
the historical situation and are therefore subject to change.
Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded,
whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can
change.12

It is true that there is an absolutely fundamental
difference between science (or even opinion)
and prudence. Science must give the ratio pure
and simple, that is to say, the reason for which a
predicate is attributed to a subject. This attribution
is universal and necessary. If you say, for example,
that the bishop of Rome is the successor of St. Peter,
this proposition is true always and everywhere,
and it cannot not be true–it is absolute. Whatever
the individual who was legitimately elected by the
cardinal bishops of Rome, whatever may be the
era of the Church’s history, this individual is the
successor of St. Peter. Prudence must give the recta
ratio agibilium, that is to say, not the reason that
explains a universal and necessary definition, but
the reason that explains why a particular action is
decided upon here and now. This reason comes at
the end of a train of thought; it is the conclusion of
a practical syllogism: in this syllogism, a universal
and necessary premise is combined with another,
particular and contingent premise. The conclusion
indicates what is true, no longer absolutely, but
relatively; no longer always and everywhere, but
in the context of certain circumstances. The goal
of such a syllogism is not to pass from an obscure
universal to another, distinct universal. One ought
to go from a universal to a particular. In effect, law
is a principle that remains too universal for it to be
applied as such; it contains in potency a multitude
of equally possible conclusions. One must choose
the conclusion that is not only possible, but also
probable or likely, that is to say, true in particular,
taking into account all the circumstances comprising
this particularity. While it may be true in one set of
circumstances, the same conclusion would be false
in different circumstances. The prudential judgment
is thus relative to circumstance.
The relativity of a judgment is thus not bad,
no more so than its absolute character. What is
faulty is to be mistaken about the nature of the
12

Ibid.

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situation and to pronounce a relative judgment
in a necessary matter13 or an absolute judgment
in a contingent matter.14 St. Thomas explains this
in his Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle: one
cannot apply a mathematical demonstration to
moral matters. A relative judgment is not a false
or insufficient judgment. It is a judgment that is
true in a certain domain up to a certain point. It
suffices in a particular context. Such a judgment
will change with the circumstances. More precisely,
the goal of a prudential judgment is to determine
the means to employ for obtaining an end, not the
means in general, which is always and everywhere
obligatory, but the means required in these particular
circumstances.

D. Relativity and Relativism
However, a judgment, even a prudential
judgment, relative to circumstances, is never purely
relative, for it has a necessary component: the end
does not justify every means. Similarly, when the
Church makes decisions relative to circumstances,
decisions which are made in contingent domains,
even so, these correspond to something necessary
as regards principles: the principles applied in a
contingent matter are not necessarily contingent.
Moreover, there is a significant difference between
making a decision in a contingent matter (that is to
say, to make a prudential act) and to pose an act
in a contingent manner (which characterizes every
human act, whether prudential or scientific). It is clear
that every act emanating from a human subject is
performed contingently, in the sense that the human
subject, being endowed with reason and liberty,
could have not posed this act; and in the sense that
this act is inscribed in history in the framework of a
duration in which no one moment exactly resembles
another. But this does not imply that every act of a
reasonable and free agent, inscribed in time, can only
be done in contingent matters.15 If by his body man
Which is quintessentially characteristic of liberalism, the successor of skepticism.
14
Which is quintessentially characteristic of mathematicism, practised by
Descartes or Spinoza. The latter erected a moral system with the title Ethica
ordine geometrico demonstrata.
15
The opposition that exists between necessity and contingency can be understood
in two distinct senses. In the first sense, it can be understood in reference to
“modus operandi,” and in this sense, a necessary operation is the opposite of
a contingent operation as the operation of a natural agent devoid of reason is
the opposite of the operation of a free agent. In his Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle (Book 2, lesson 13) St. Thomas explains that a natural agent
always acts in the same manner because, devoid of reason, it is incapable of
varying its means, unlike a free agent, who can vary his art. Thus all spiders’
webs resemble each other in a way that house dishes (normally) do not. In the
second sense, the distinction can be understood about the matter constituting
the object of the operation, and in this sense a necessary operation contrasts
with a contingent operation as the operation of science contrasts with that
13

22

is the subject of movement, is inscribed in duration,
and is partly contingent, by his soul he can attain
necessary and immutable truths that prescind from
historical contingence. And in fact, in large part,
the declarations of the magisterium of the modern
era prior to Vatican II concern necessary matters.
Even though they are inscribed in the historical
context of the 19th century, an age different from
ours, the declarations of Pope Pius IX condemning
religious liberty and the false principles of the
Enlightenment are definitive and necessary: Pope
Pius IX condemned the error of liberalism per se, as it
must be expressed always and everywhere, and which
is formulated in a principle that remains in universal
and necessary opposition to divinely revealed
doctrine.

E. The Continuity of Faith and
Reason according to St. Thomas
It is, moreover, inexact to say that St. Thomas
Aquinas achieved the conciliation between faith
and Aristotelian philosophy, “thereby setting faith
in a positive relationship with the form of reason
prevalent in his time.”16 St. Thomas reconciled faith
and reason, and not the Faith and Aristotelianism,
or faith and the rational thought of his time, which
would be the modern thought of the 13th century.
The Thomist synthesis is good for all times. As Pope
Pius X said in the Motu Proprio Doctoris Angelici of
June 29, 1914, it represents a body of principles
which are the means “of refuting all the errors of
all the ages.” He adds: “…the capital theses in the
philosophy of St. Thomas are not to be placed in
the category of opinions capable of being debated
one way or another, but are to be considered as
the foundations upon which the whole science of
natural and divine things is based.”17 Pope Pius XII
was to say the same thing some 30 years later in
the Encyclical Humani Generis of August 12, 1950:
“For this philosophy, acknowledged and accepted
by the Church, safeguards the genuine validity of
human knowledge, the unshakable metaphysical
principles of sufficient reason, causality, and finality,
and finally the mind’s ability to attain certain and
unchangeable truth” (§29). The synthesis achieved
by St. Thomas at a specific moment of history is the
definitive, necessary and sufficient reconciliation
of the Faith and the philosophy natural to human
reason. It is possible, certainly, to make progress in
a better understanding of Revelation and to try to
delve more deeply into the divine mysteries, having
recourse to the lights of reason guided by faith. “And,
indeed, reason illustrated by faith, when it zealously,
of art or prudence. That is why all mathematics classes are alike, whereas
no artistic masterpiece or diplomatic treaty resembles another.
16
Benedict XVI, Allocution of December 22, 2005.
17
English version online at http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/doctoris.htm.

THE ANGELUS • January 2010 www.angeluspress.org

piously, and soberly seeks, attains with the help of
God some understanding of the mysteries.”18�But in
this search, reason illustrated by faith cannot change
instruments: its natural and necessary tool continues
to be the perennial philosophy in its basic principles,
perfectly synthesized by St. Thomas. That is why
there is no continuity possible between the Faith
and the modern thought that issued from the 18th
century; churchmen cannot entertain the ambition
of expressing the Faith “through the literary forms
of modern thought,” if by that is meant the modern
philosophy of the Enlightenment.

F. The Rupture of Relativism in
the Thought of Benedict XVI
In his speech of December 2005, Pope Benedict
XVI reasons as if every decision, by the very fact
of its belonging to history, can only concern a
contingent matter and only express a truth relative
to circumstances. One could not be more explicit
in making doctrinal relativism a matter of principle.
And, moreover, the example the Pope adduces to
illustrate the nature of true reform, which according
to him consists in a “combination of continuity
and discontinuity,” indicates very clearly that it
is not only the application of the principles that
changes, but the principles themselves. He tells us:
“…it was necessary to give a new definition to the
relationship between the Church and the modern
State that would make room impartially for citizens
of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming
responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence
among them and for the freedom to practise their
own religion.” Yet there is no continuity, but rather a
complete discontinuity between the new principle of
Dignitatis Humanae, equivalent to the new definition
of the relationship between Church and State, and
the principle reiterated by Leo XIII in the Encyclical
Immortale Dei of November 1, 1885, according to
which
it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So,
too, is it a sin for the State not to have care for religion as
something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or
out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes
in with the fancy; for we are bound absolutely to worship
God in that way which He has shown to be His will. All who
rule, therefore, would hold in honour the holy name of God,
and one of their chief duties must be to favour religion, to
protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the
laws, and neither to organize nor enact any measure that
may compromise its safety. (§6)

It is absolutely inexact to assert, as does Benedict
XVI, that “the Second Vatican Council, recognizing
and making its own an essential principle of
the modern State with the Decree on Religious
Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of
Vatican Council I, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, Chap. 4, Dz. 1796.

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THE ANGELUS • January 2010

the Church.” The teaching of Vatican II on religious
liberty effected, rather, a rupture with respect to all
of Tradition and thus with respect to the deepest
patrimony of the Church.

G. The Real Significance of the
Speech of December 22, 2005
The hermeneutic of reform as conceived by
Pope Benedict XVI is not, then, the expression of
a return to the Tradition of the Church. Benedict
XVI doubtless is trying to establish a continuity
between Vatican II and the teachings of the previous
magisterium. But this is not continuity as the popes
have always understood it until the last Council,
continuity in the unaltered transmission of the same
substantially immutable doctrine. Continuity as
understood by Pope Benedict XVI is the continuity
of a new living tradition, continuity in the relativism
by which one thinks it possible to overcome
contradictions by employing the principle that the
teachings of the Church are expressed in a matter
that is always contingent.
To conclude, we shall examine more closely this
new notion of living tradition, at least as understood
by Pope Benedict XVI.

Part III:
The New Relativism
of Living Tradition
The doctrinal relativism expressed in the
Christmas address of December 22, 2005,
corresponds in the current pope’s thinking to the
distorted notion of Tradition that is in line with the
Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei Adflicta of John Paul II.
This notion is described in Pope Benedict XVI’s
catechesis on the Church found in the general
audiences of April 26, May 3, and May 10, 2006,
published in L’Osservatore Romano. Tradition is no
longer defined as the transmission of the deposit of
divinely revealed truths. It is first of all conceived as
an Experience and a Life.

A. Tradition Redefined
In the fifth allocution of April 26, Pope Benedict
XVI expressed himself thus:
The Holy Spirit appears to us as the guarantor of the
active presence of the mystery in history, the One who
ensures its realization down the centuries. Thanks to the
Paraclete, it will always be possible for subsequent genera-

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tions to have the same experience of the Risen One that
was lived by the apostolic community at the origin of the
Church, since it is passed on and actualized in the faith, worship and communion of the People of God, on pilgrimage
through time….The Church’s apostolic Tradition consists in
this transmission of the goods of salvation which, through
the power of the Spirit makes the Christian community
the permanent actualization of the original communion.19

Tradition is not first and foremost the
transmission of dogmas, the perpetual teaching
of revealed truths, nor the administration of the
sacraments and the celebration of divine worship.
It is undoubtedly this transmission, but as the
prolongation of the communitarian experience
of the origins: by means of this transmission, the
communion of today continues the communion of
yesterday, the lived experience of past generations
continues in the lived experience of present
generations.
A little farther on, we find another definition that
expresses again the same idea:
Tradition is not the transmission of things or words, a
collection of dead things. Tradition is the living river that
links us to the origins, the living river in which the origins
are ever present, the great river that leads us to the gates
of eternity.20

In the sixth allocution of May 3, Benedict
recapitulated his theme:
[Apostolic Tradition] is not a collection of things or
words, like a box of dead things. Tradition is the river of
new life that flows from the origins, from Christ down to us,
and makes us participate in God’s history with humanity.21

A little farther on he adds:
So it is that Tradition is the living Gospel, proclaimed by
the Apostles in its integrity on the basis of the fullness of
their unique and unrepeatable experience: through their
activity the faith is communicated to others, even down
to us, until the end of the world. Tradition, therefore, is
the history of the Spirit who acts in the Church’s history
through the mediation of the Apostles and their successors,
in faithful continuity with the experience of the origins.22

B. A Coherent Discourse, But
Contrary to the Church’s
Teaching
One readily understands what Benedict XVI
means when he states that “Vatican II embraces the
entire doctrinal history of the Church,” and that
“Anyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council
Benedict XVI, “Communion in Time: Tradition,” General Audience, April
26, 2006, www.vatican.va/holy_father/ benedict_xvi/audiences/2006.
20
Ibid.
21
Benedict XVI, “The Apostolic Tradition of the Church,” General Audience,
May 3, 2006, www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2006.
22
Ibid.
19

24

has to accept the faith professed over the centuries,
and cannot sever the roots from which the tree
draws its life.”23 The “entire doctrinal history of the
Church” and the “faith professed over centuries” of
which he spoke in March 2009 is the living Tradition
of which he spoke to us in May 2006, namely “the
history of the Spirit who acts in the Church’s history
through the mediation of the Apostles and their
successors, in faithful continuity with the experience
of the origins.” The Pope’s theme holds together
perfectly from one end to the other. But it is a
theme that gives an absolutely new definition to the
magisterium and Tradition, in complete opposition
to the teachings of the magisterium prior to the
Second Vatican Council.

C. An Unchangeable Tradition
and a Living Magisterium
It is true that the Church renders more explicit
the expression of revealed truths and thus procures
to the faithful a deeper understanding of the deposit
of the Faith. It is in this sense that it could be said
that the traditional magisterium was also a living
magisterium. “Living” contrasts with “posthumous.”
This attribute concerns the subject and the act of
the magisterium (magisterium as understood in its
first and second senses), but not the object of the
magisterium (magisterium understood in its third
sense).
From the viewpoint of the second sense
(magisterium understood as the act of teaching), the
posthumous magisterium is the simple repetition of
the teaching formerly given authoritatively by the
living and authentic magisterium after it ceased. It
is carried out by writing. The living magisterium is
the ongoing exercise of the authentic magisterium.
It is carried out principally by oral preaching and
incidentally by writing.
From the viewpoint of the first sense (magisterium
understood as the subject who exercises the act of
teaching), the magisterium is living in the sense that
in every age of history the prudence of pastors is
always sufficiently inventive for enlightening the
minds of the faithful and proposing to them the
same truth in a manner more thoroughly adapted
to their circumstances. In the disputed question
No. 11 in the series De Veritate, St. Thomas shows
in Article 4 that teaching is a work belonging to the
active life. In effect, the act of teaching concerns a
twofold object, a twofold matter. There is the truth
to be taught: in relation to this object, teaching
is a work of the contemplative life. There is the
audience to be taught: in relation to this object,
23

Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church Concerning
the Remission of the Excommunication of the Four Bishops Consecrated
by Archbishop Lefebvre, on line at www.vatican.va.

THE ANGELUS • January 2010 www.angeluspress.org

teaching is a work of the active life.24 Affecting the
audience to be taught are variable circumstances
to which the preaching should be adapted. The
audience is not uniform, and it may appear in
quite different conditions. These diverse conditions
will be, for example, errors holding sway over the
faithful which endanger their correct understanding
of revealed truth and render necessary a more
explicit exposition of doctrine.25 These diverse
conditions also correspond to the diversity of
time and place which make necessary diversely
appropriate explications at the level of positive
ecclesiastical law.26 In this sense, the transmission
of Catholic doctrine is a living preaching because
it is a pastoral preaching, the pastor being the one
who uses discernment and takes into account the
dispositions of his flock (according to the scholastic
adage: quidquid recipitur in aliquo est in eo per modum
recipientis–“whatever is received into anything
must be received according to the condition of the
receiver”27). This is why such teaching is principally
oral.28
But this has nothing to do with the “pastoral
magisterium” Vatican II claims to express. Actually,
the magisterium of the Second Vatican Council
was intended to be pastoral because it changed the
truth under the pretext of adapting the preaching
of the truth to the understanding of modern man.
Now if the magisterium is living in the first and
second senses of the word, objective Tradition,
which is identical to the magisterium understood
in the third sense (and which equates to dogmas,
namely, divinely revealed truths which are the
object of the preaching of the magisterium), is
not living, but unchangeable. The ecclesiastical
preaching only becomes more precise when the
pastors of the Church exercise their magisterium
in order to give a deeper understanding of dogma.
But the dogma does not change. There is progress,
not in the dogma, but in the understanding of the
dogma by the faithful, who are better protected
against the assaults of error. It is the passage from
an implicit knowledge to an explicit knowledge; the
change affects the mode by which the minds of the
faithful will exercise their adherence to the object
of faith. The object of faith remains unchanged, and
it is formally revealed before being defined by the
pope as it is afterward. For example, the faithful
implicitly believed in the Immaculate Conception
This duality of matter is well rendered by the construction of the Latin verb
“docere,” which takes a double accusative.
25
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 1, Art. 9, ad 2.
26
Ibid., Art. 7, ad 2 and ad 3
27
Summa Theologica, I, Q. 76, Art. 2, 3rd objection.
28
Written expression involves certain limits oral teaching escapes. That is
why the latter is the preferred means expression of prudence, which must
maintain enough flexibility to deal with circumstances as they arise. This
reality shows us why the Catholic religion is not a “Religion of the Book.”

by believing explicitly that the Blessed Virgin
possessed the fullness of grace (a truth taught in
Sacred Scripture in the Gospel according to St.
Luke, 1:28). This fullness of grace involves many
things, and in particular the conception free from
original sin. This particular consequence was made
explicit by the definition of Pope Pius IX (whereas
another particular consequence was to be made
explicit by Pius XII when he proclaimed the dogma
of the Assumption). Since then, the faithful must
believe not only implicitly, but explicitly in the
truth of the Immaculate Conception. The evolution
bears precisely and exclusively upon the mode of
belief: the way in which the believer exercises his act,
implicitly or explicitly, and not on the object of the
belief.

D. From the Living Magisterium
to the New Living Tradition
In short, a certain merely extrinsic development
of dogma can be admitted, but never intrinsic,
that is to say a development, not of the dogma qua
dogma, but of the understanding of it possessed by
the faithful. On the one hand, the progress of this
understanding must be “in the same dogma, with
the same sense and the same understanding,”29
without calling in question the objective nature of
the revealed deposit. On the other hand, it is the
infallible and constant magisterium, the traditional
magisterium of the Church and it alone, that must
give this understanding, not simple natural reason
nor philosophy alone. In the Constitution Dei
Filius, the First Vatican Council consecrated by its
authority this essential property of the ecclesiastical
magisterium, namely, that it is to be a constant
magisterium:
[T]hat understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once
declared; and there must never be recession from that
meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding.30

To this definition corresponds the following canon:
If anyone shall have said that it is possible that to the
dogmas declared by the Church a meaning must sometimes
be attributed according to the progress of science, different
from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.31

Even if the Church’s preaching is exercised
contingently, in the framework of historical

24

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THE ANGELUS • January 2010

Vatican Council I, Constitution Dei Filius, Chap. 4, in Dz. 1800.
Ibid.
31
Ibid., Canon 3 of Chapter 4, in Dz. 1818.
29
30

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circumstances, its object is the transmission of
divinely revealed truths, which are not contingent, but
necessary and immutable. The confusion introduced
by the Discourse of December 22 is on this level: one
has passed from a living magisterium (ecclesiastical
preaching that is done in order to transmit the
same truth in a contingent manner, namely, by taking
circumstances into account) to a living Tradition
(ecclesiastical preaching that is exercised in contingent
matters, namely, in order to establish a renewed and
changing relationship between faith and contemporary
thought as it changes from age to age). Thus one has
passed from extrinsic and homogeneous dogmatic
development to intrinsic and relativist development.

Epilogue
The program of the Toulouse colloquium was to
“focus on the ways in which Thomistic theology can
contribute to a reception of Vatican II that honors the
Council as an act of living Tradition.” We can say here
and now, without fear of being mistaken, that their
reflection will be trapped by the difficulty in which it
has been circumscribed from the outset. If you admit
the assumption of the living Tradition, then no serious
critique of the conciliar teachings will be possible.
It will be necessary, willy-nilly, to admit religious
freedom, ecumenism, and the new ecclesiology
into the common patrimony of the Church, even
at the price of contradiction, or rather thanks to
the contradiction raised to the first principle of all
theological reflection. For if Tradition is living, then
movement is being and everything becomes possible…
and imaginable.

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The only “Thomistic reception” which seems
to us conceivable is the one that will begin by
unambiguously defining Tradition and magisterium
in conformity with the teachings of Pope Pius IX and
the First Vatican Council. In these conditions, and
only in these conditions, can we nourish the hope of
interpreting the teachings of Vatican II “in the light of
Tradition,” understood as all the popes and Catholic
bishops understood it until the Council.
Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize
Translated exclusively by Angelus Press from the Courier de Rome, June-August
2009, pp.1-5.

The ANgeLus • January 2010 www.angeluspress.org