Don Divo Barsotti with Giacomo Cardinal Biffi
Don Divo Barsotti 1915-2006
The Widening Rift
In a new book sent to the printing press in recent days, Professor Enrico Maria Radaelli — philosopher, theologian, and beloved disciple of one of the greatest traditionalist Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century, the Swiss Romano Amerio (1905-1997) — cites three passages taken from the unpublished diaries of Fr. Divo Barsotti (1914-2006).
"Diabolical Pride"
In them, this brilliant and esteemed mystic and spiritual master — who in 1971 was called to preach the Lenten exercises to the pope and to the Roman curia — expressed strong criticisms of Vatican Council II. Fr. Barsotti wrote:
I am perplexed with regard to the Council: the plethora of documents, their length, often their language, these frightened me. They are documents that bear witness to a purely human assurance more than to a simple firmness of faith. But above all I am outraged by the behaviour of the theologians.
The Council is the supreme exercise of the magisterium, and is justified only by a supreme necessity. Could not the fearful gravity of the present situation of the Church stem precisely from the foolishness of having wanted to provoke and tempt the Lord?Was there the desire, perhaps, to constrain God to speak when there was not this supreme necessity? Is that the way it is? In order to justify a Council that presumed to renew all things, it had to be affirmed that everything was going poorly, something that is done constantly, if not by the episcopate then by the theologians.
Nothing seems to me more grave, contrary to the holiness of God, than the presumption of clerics who believe, with a pride that is purely diabolical, that they can manipulate the truth, who presume to renew the Church and to save the world without renewing themselves. In all the history of the Church nothing is comparable to the latest Council, at which the Catholic episcopate believed that it could renew all things by obeying nothing other than its own pride, without the effort of holiness, in such open opposition to the law of the gospel that it requires us to believe how the humanity of Christ was the instrument of the omnipotence of the love that saves, in his death. READ MORE HERE
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