Memoirs of a Slow Learner and a Deficient Fruit Inspector

Dr. Robert Hickson 21 September 2020

Saint Matthew (d. 65)

Epigraphs

“Who were exempt from taking the 1910 Antimodernist Oath, why, and since when? Were the Vatican II Fathers themselves and their Advisors (Periti) also exempt, or did some of them gravely and consequentially perjure themselves?”

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“What are the actual repercussions and some further implications of 17 July 1967: Pope Paul VI’s formal rescinding and abrogation of the Antimodernist Oath?”

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Some time ago when I spoke to a friend of mine about my recurrent “reflections on life from the vantage point of a mere fruit inspector,” I should have fittingly added also another small truth: my persistent desire someday to present mine own “memoirs of a slow learner.”

For, after graduating as a new second-lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers from West Point on 3 June 1964, I lived largely out of the country, or in secluded military training, up until January of 1971. It was then that I unexpectedly returned to a civilian Graduate School at the University of North Carolina in the same State as Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at which military post I was first formed as a young Army Special Forces Officer, and was thus to be a recipient of the cherished “three-prefix” to my MOS in 1966, after I had first attended parachute and ranger schools (where a 7-prefix and a 8-prefix were, respectively, to be added first to my main “Military Occupational Specialty” (MOS)). In 1966, however, there was not yet—not until 8 April 1987, some twenty years later—a special military branch set aside and designated for Army Special Forces overall. And so, before 1987, the “three-prefix” was the designator to be found in one’s personnel records, along with our patched green berets.

During all this very active time (1962-1971), the deep contrasts of foreign strategic and religious cultures influenced me greatly and prompted me to wonder about many fundamental things, and these things were often matters of moment to man. Although I was then still very innocent and ignorant, I had a strong and vivid sense of adventure—and an unquenched propensity to ask searching, sometimes uncomfortable, questions. I thereby gradually came to understand some things about the Church, too.

Now, for instance, I am still gradually learning many important things about the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church and its equivocal earlier preparations and its confusing aftermath. Here, too, I have been, alas, a deficient “Fruit Inspector” and am still a “Slow Learner.”

For instance, in late July of 1967, I was returning from Istanbul to New York City by way of a civilian ship, from my one-year military assignment in Turkey, with visits to Greece, Turkey’s own opponent also on the eastern flank of NATO, to include the contested divided island of Cypress.

Earlier in July of 1967, on page one of The New York Times near the bottom of the page, Tad Szulc contributed a special 17 July report from Rome published on 18 July 1967 and with the following headline: “Pope Said to Cancel Antimodernist Oath; Pope Paul Said to Abrogate Antimodernist Oath.” And this is what he said in his first paragraph from Rome, which was dated 17 July 1967: “Pope Paul VI was reported today to have ordered the abrogation of the oath against modernism that Roman Catholic priests and ecclesiastical officials have been obliged to take for the last 57 years [i.e., since its promulgation by Pope Pius X on 1 September 1910].”

It was only later that I heard of, and then considered the implications of, this 17 July 1967 promulgated recension and abrogation of that solemn Oath established by Pope Pius X in 1910.

Shortly after this Roman act, the lax and rebellious Land O’ Lakes Conference in Wisconsin (20-23 July 1967) took place. Its own final Statement about academic freedom and authority was signed and promulgated on 23 July 1967, which was only a few days before Pope Paul VI went to Turkey.

Pope Paul VI came to visit Turkey from 25-26 July 1967, and he was on one of his further missions of diplomacy and so-called ecumenism, first of all with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras, and then also briefly with the government of the Turks.

Paul VI was meeting Athenagoras for the second time. He had first met Athenagoras in Lebanon, and both meetings were importantly arranged by Dr. Charles Malik, a prominent Lebanese academic and diplomatic figure, also as Lebanese ambassador to the U.S. and at the United Nations. (Dr. Malik was an Orthodox Christian and academic philosopher, but, despite his abiding Catholic sympathies, he never became a Roman Catholic after Paul VI’s words to him privately and personally—i.e., that it was sufficient for him to believe in the Council of Florence, 1431-1449; and so he did not need to convert.¹)

It was in such a lax and softly tolerant way that the revolutions of 1968 were gradually fomented. I came to believe that, without the optimistic and selectively merciful Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and its immediately applied aftermath (late 1965-early 1968), there would not have been the widespread revolutions of May 1968 and thereafter. In late 1968 and 1969, I saw some of the violence in Japan after I had returned from Vietnam. The Socialists in Japan were, surprisingly, even more radical and violent than the Communists.

It was in 1969 that Paul VI’s revolutionary New Order of the Mass was promulgated and then gradually spread throughout the world. In June of 1968, Paul VI also published his partly attenuated and yet still widely criticized Encyclical Humanae Vitae.

But, it was very soon after Paul VI became pope in the middle of June 1963 that he quietly first lifted (on 5 July 1963) the ban and in 1966 introduced the spreading allowance of priestly officiating at cremations for human bodies after death. There is always both a Slow Path as well as a Fast Path in a Revolution. And we must also closely follow the Language as well as the Money.

We may look at the itch for a novel use of words—for example, “dialogue” and “ecumenism” (or syncretism? perhaps as a subtle relativism?) and “evolution” (that is, an “ongoing Revelation”?, or the “Evolution of Dogma” instead of affirming the just permanence of “irreformable doctrine”?).

So much has changed since that Summer of 1962 when I, at a callow nineteen years of age, first returned to West Point from our memorable German Exchange Program abroad, just before the October 1962 beginning of Vaticanum II amidst the threats in Berlin and risks of nuclear war, not only in Cuba.

Soon I was to hear (or read) such things as: “our result is more process”; “God needs us to complete Himself”; and “They have asked the Blessed Mother to leave the Marriage Feast of Cana”—“and they did not even give her the time to say: ‘Vinum non habent‘”—i.e., “they have no wine.”

It is as if the Blessed Virgin Maria were a multi-layered obstacle (“obex”) to a Grand Ecumenism!

It is true, I have often learned some deeper truths by carefully inspecting the fruits of new or alien ideas and actions and strategic networks and attitudes. But too often, alas, I have been a slow learner.

CODA

In the context of this brief essay, I also wanted to recommend to our readers that they revisit my 7 October 2019 reflections on the words of Cardinal Walter Brandmüller concerning the Oath against Modernism: https://ordodei.net/2019/10/08/the-oath-against-modernism-1910-1967-and-cardinal-walter-brandmullers-recent-words/

–FINIS–

© 2020 Robert D. Hickson

1Charles Malik told this whole “ecumenical” scandal to his intimate boyhood, Lebanese friend, Brother Francis Maluf, M.I.C.M. (Dr. Fakhri Maluf), who, in turn, told the whole story to me in person. Malik never formally converted.