PopeWatch: Inconstant Constance

A very interesting article over at Lifesite News:

Eugene IV, in the Decree of the Council of Florence, which on September 4, 1439, condemned the Fathers of Basil, “to save” the Council of Constance, resorted to that, which, in modern terms might be defined a “hermeneutic of continuity” today used with regard to the Second Vatican Council. He, in fact, sustained that the proposition of the superiority of the Councils over the Pope, affirmed by the Fathers of Basil on the basis of Haec Sancta, was “a bad interpretation (pravum intellectum), made by the Basilians, which de facto reveals itself to be contrary to the authentic sense of Holy Scripture, of the Holy Fathers and of the Council of Constance itself.”3 The Fathers of Basil, according to the Pope “interpreted the declaration of the Council of Constance in a wicked and reprehensible sense, totally alien to sound doctrine.4 Today we would say: an abusive interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, distorting the documents.

Subsequently, in the letter Etsi dubitemus of April 21 1441, Eugene IV condemned the “diabolical founders” of the conciliarism doctrine: Marsilius of Padova, John of Jandun and William of Ockham 5 , but regarding Haec Sancta he took a hesitant stance, along the lines of the “hermeneutic of continuity”. The same Eugene IV ratified the Council of Constance in its entirety, and its decrees, «absque tamen praejudicio juris, dignitatis et praeminentiae Sedis apostolicae» as he writes on July 22, 1336 to his legate: a formula that clarified the sense of Martin V’s restriction, condemning implicitly, in the name of the Primacy of the Roman Pontiff, all those who referred to the Council of Constance in affirming the superiority of the council over the Pope.

Consequently the thesis of “continuity” between Haec Sancta and the Tradition of the Church was abandoned by theologians and historians, and among them Cardinal Brandmüller, who rightly expunges Haec Sancta and the decree Frequens from the Tradition of the Church. Even at the time of the Counter-Reform, Father Melchor Cano states that Haec Sancta should be rejected as it did not have the dogmatic form of a “decree obliging the faithful to believe or condemn the contrary”6 . Similarly, Cardinal Baudrillart, in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, retains that the Council of Constance, in issuing Haec Sancta did not have the intention of promulgating a dogmatic definition, and it is also for this the document was subsequently repudiated by the Church.7 The Church historian August Franzen affirms the same.8 Thereby, in raising the question of the ecumenical nature of the Council of Constance, Father Joseph Gill, one of its foremost experts, writes that: «les historiens s’accordent à le considérer comme oecuménique, mais dans des proportions variables». 9

Why exclude then that a day will come when even the Second Vatican Council may be repudiated, in part, or en bloc, as happened with the Council of Constance and its decrees?

Go here to read the rest.  The history of the Church is very long and in that history boneheaded ideas adopted by Popes and Councils have often been put aside.  That this will happen to that Council of Councils, Vatican II, as the years roll by, in whole or in part, is a very safe prediction.