Interpreting Vatican II: “A New Pentecost”

Two Interpretations of Vatican Ii? Myth or Reality

More than 40 years after the Council’s close, we are faced with the paradox of a Council that meant to speak a new language more comprehensible to modern man, yet which today remains the object of discussions about its correct interpretation. We have grown accustomed to hearing of the “two hermeneutics of Vatican II,” two interpretations of the conciliar documents that have been championed in t...

In the Vatican

VATICAN CITY [AP) • Pope John Paul I assumed the throne of St. Peter and leadership of the world's 700 million Roman Catholics yesterday in solemn, outdoor rite marked by the simplicity already a hall-mark of his papacy. Breaking more than 1,000 years of tradition, the 65-year-old pontiff donned a simple white wool stole as the shepherd of his flock and concelebrated his inaugural Mass with the...

Pentecost: Paul the Pastor in 2 Corinthians

Vatican Ii and the Challenge of Marriage and Family in Africa

It is generally known that the teaching of Catholic Moral Theology before Vatican II focused especially on the aim of the marriage. It emphasized the three aims which St Augustine pointed out: proles, fides, sacramentum. Love seemed to be secondary because children were seen as the highest good of the sacred bond between wife and husband. From this viewpoint the Constitution Gaudium et spes of ...

The Vatican Versus Freud

out of the minds of the monks he has had psychoanalysed by a distinguished Jewish woman, but also how to purge his own brain of such poison. The man is Gregoire Lemercier, the sixth of an artillery officer's thirteen children who feared his father and at the same time wanted to emulate him. When he became a priest he transferred his complex to God. His autoanalytical sermons bloom with double f...