Ecclesiological Errors of “Easter Letter” Reactionaries Summed Up

Ecclesiological Errors of “Easter Letter” Reactionaries Summed Up May 9, 2019

That is, Ones Not Specifically Related to Pope Francis: Especially Vatican II as the Big Bad Wolf

Some folks don’t like to read much and/or prefer to get right down to brass tacks. My original post on this topic was 2991 words long. This will be a lot shorter (only 628 words). For further documentation, see the original. Do these critics speak for you?
 
1) Fr. Thomas Crean doesn’t like Pope St. John Paul II, and opposed his canonization. He also took a shot at Pope St. Paul VI as he opined: “No blessed or sainted Pope in Church history has a legacy as troubling as that of John Paul II, and perhaps no Pope at all aside from Paul VI.”
2) Deacon Nick Donnelly has attacked Pope St. John Paul II and associated him with the alleged heresies of Pope Francis: “Pope John Paul II’s Assisi syncretist jamboree gives Francis the excuse for this travesty. Just as JPII’s unilateral change to the Catechism over the death penalty gives Francis the ‘mandate’ to change it at will. Francis is exploiting every mistake made by Pope John Paul.” (Twitter, 9-18-18)
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3) Fr. John Hunwicke wrote: “Clearly, we have now definitively (irreversibly?) moved out of the dark shadow of Vatican II ” (9-19-17) and described Vatican II as “obsolete or, at the very least, obsolescent.” (2-17-07)
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4) Dr. John Lamont questioned the beatification of Pope St. John Paul II  and asserted that the ” teachings of Vatican II formally contradict the tradition of the Church.”
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5) Dr. Peter Kwasniewski thinks that Vatican II itself (not its distortion) is a seedbed of “progressivism and modernism” and that “John Paul II and Benedict XVI . . . were swimming in a lake of Kool-Aid rather than the ocean of Tradition . . . [and] were conflicted and inconsistent progressives.” He ties Pope Francis in with popes of the last 60 years: “Bergoglio is the distillation of all the worst tendencies in Roncalli, Montini, Wojtyła, and Ratzinger . . .” Agreeing with Fr. Thomas Kocik (and in glaring contradiction of Pope Benedict XVI), he thinks the Pauline / “New” / ordinary form Mass is “so radical a deconstruction and reconstruction of the Roman liturgy that it does not exist in the same tradition of organic development. It is a new departure, a new thing, not a revision of the old thing . . .”
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6) Professor Matteo d’Amico was a member of SSPX in 2005. I believe he may be a member still, according to several Italian sites, where it was not exactly clear, but “FSSPX” keeps showing up in searches of his name.
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7) Maria Guarini published on her blog Chiesa e Postconcilio an article by Fr. Albert Kallio (6-26-18) which contended that Vatican II espoused a collegiality which he falsely equates with heretical medieval conciliarism (basically, the primacy of councils over the pope): a doctrine which was “new and contradicted a belief and a centuries-old practice of the Church” and “contradict[ed] the previous magisterium.”
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8) Dr. Robert Hickson thinks Vatican II was a “revolution” that cannot be reconciled with the Church’s tradition regarding religious liberty, syncretism, indifferentism, grace, conscience, and the nature of the Church.
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9) Brian M. McCall thinks that Pope St. Paul VI, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Vatican II “wrought this destruction of the Roman Rite” and “the destruction of the Church’s hierarchical structure.” He states in his infinite wisdom: “The last fifty years is simply the natural consequence of the ideas and expressions issued by . . . the terrible crisis that was the Second Vatican Council.” He cries: “Away with this robber Council; we are going back to Tradition.”
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10) Prof. Paolo Pasqualucci is profoundly against Vatican II as well: “Pasqualucci identifies . . . 26 distinct points of rupture with the Tradition of the Church in the texts of the Vatican II documents themselves.”
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