THE 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council is a sad occasion for some Catholics.
“When, oh when, will we admit we’ve gone down a dead end, so we can turn back and find the way again?” is not an uncommon lament.
Alas, to turn back is impossible just as a thrown stone cannot be made to return to the hand that hurled it.
The Church today needs a modern Thomas Aquinas to re-display to today’s world the precious unchanging pearls of Christian truth because the Second Vatican Council has been found wanting.
Thomas’ postulates of an ordered, divinely created, natural law-shaped world had a natural ally, many centuries later, in Newtonian Physics.
The latter postulated a similarly, orderly, deterministic world.
Cardinal Newman, G. K. Chesterton and many other prominent Catholic writers of the late 19th Century were products of these two world views.
The Church seemed like a lighthouse in a storm giving guidance and hope to the world.
Unfortunately but slowly, came technological advancement.
Newtonian Physics was found wanting and had to be abandoned.
The replacement was quantum mechanics and particle physics and Einsteinian relativity – all these unbelievably mysterious, complex, and in violation of our everyday sense of reality.
Add to that accelerants like Marxism and Nazism, and the world view of humanity became senseless, complex, threatening, chaotic, nihilistic and cynical.
But the pain of that was anaesthetised through scientific advancement bringing to many unprecedented short-term material comfort which, in turn, stimulated euphoria that celebrated human achievement and supremacy.
That is the world we have today.
The postulates of Thomas Aquinas simply cut no ice in such a world.
Empty, closed churches, unprecedented faith ignorance, widespread vice, empty monasteries and seminaries are the symptoms of this real and extremely serious intellectual crisis in Christianity that the Second Vatican Council did not anticipate.
In short, we need Thomas Aquinas Two. I doubt that I will see him in my lifetime.
GEORGE SZYLKARSKI
Graceville, Qld
