Cardinal Koch rejects extreme positions around the Vatican Second

Cardinal Kurt Koch rejected the extreme positions of progressive and traditionalists around the Second Vatican Council in his acceptance speech of the Honoris Causa Doctorate granted by the Catholic University of Valencia.

The prefect of Dicasteries for the promotion of the unity of Christians reflected in their master lesson on the tension between the two axes of the Second Vatican Council: the fidelity to the sources and the fidelity to the signs of the times.

For the purple, “the relationship between these two dimensions has always characterized the church, but the tension has become sharpened in a new way after Vatican II.”

Given this dichotomy, Cardinal Koch opted because “beyond secularist conformism and separatist fundamentalism, it is necessary to look for a third way in the Catholic faith, which has already been shown by the Council.”

According to the prefect, both the so -called progressive and the traditionalists “conceive the Vatican II as a break, although oppositely.” For the former the breakdown occurs after the council, while the latter understand that it occurred in it.

Given this, the cardinal considered that “the two extreme positions are so close, precisely because they do not interpret the Vatican II within the general tradition of the Church.”

In his speech, Cardinal Koch recalled, regarding the traditionalist vision that focuses only on the sources, which Benedict XVI said that “the magisterial authority of the Church cannot be frozen in 1962”.

Church mundaneous risk

On the other hand, “if the emphasis is put only on the update (Update), there is a danger that the opening of the Church to the world, desired and made by the Council, becomes a hurried adaptation of the foundations of faith to the spirit of modern time, ”said the purple.

“Not a few currents in the post -contest period were so oriented so much to the world that they did not realize the tentacles of the modern spirit or underestimated their impact,” added the cardinal, “so that the so -called conversion to the world did not make the yeast of the Gospel Modern society will permeate more, but rather led to a broad conformism of the Church with the world. ”

Cardinal Koch’s proposal before both positions that he considers equally rupturists is “the recovery of a healthy balance in the relationship between faith and the Church, on the one hand, and the world, on the other.”

In his opinion, if the Church cannot be confused with the world, “the original identity of faith and the Church should not be defined in such a way that it separates from the world in a fundamentalist way.”

In this sense, he added that the dialogue between the Church and the contemporary world “should not make faith and church adapt to the world in a secularist way, dangerously renouncing its identity.”

What does Church reform mean?

For the prefect of Dicasteries for the promotion of the unity of Christians, the reform of the Church cannot imply “a change of essence”, but consists in “the elimination of the inauthentic” through a process of purification of the Church “based” based on in its origins “, so that” the form of the only dear church pro Christ can be visible again. ”

“For the council, fidelity to the origins and compliance with the times were not opposite. Rather, the council wanted As an aid to their lives, ”he said.

In conclusion, for the purple “the Council did not generate a new church in rupture with tradition or conceived a different faith, but rather pointed to a renewal of faith already a renewed church from the spirit of the Christian message that has been revealed once and for all and transmitted in the living tradition of the Church. ”