September 28

What significance does a council actually have in the Church?… Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil, both of whom spoke from experience, were right in saying that, with the coming together and the inevitable disagreements of many individuals, a council gives rise to unpleasant effects—ambition, strife, and the wounds that accompany them. Sometimes, however, such secondary effects must be endured for the sake of removing longstanding evils, just as we take medicine, despite many side-effects, for the sake of combating a greater evil. From time to time, councils are a necessity, but they always point to an extraordinary situation in the Church and are not to be regarded as a model for her life in general or even as the ideal content of her existence. They are medicine, not nourishment. Medicine must be assimilated and its immunizing effect must be retained by the body, but, in general, it achieves its effect precisely by becoming superfluous, by continuing to be an extraordinary measure. In plain language: the council is an organ of consultation and decision. As such, it is not an end in itself but an instrument in the service of the life of the Church. The real content of Christianity is not the discussion of its Christian content and of ways of realizing it: the content of Christianity is the community of word, sacrament, and love of neighbor, to which justice and truth bear a fundamental relationship. The dream of making one’s whole life a series of discussions, which, for a time, brought even our universities to the brink of paralysis, also exercised an influence on the Church under the label of the conciliar idea. If a council becomes the model of Christianity per se, then the constant discussion of Christian themes comes to be considered the content of Christianity itself; but that is exactly where the failure to recognize the true meaning of Christianity lies.… “Simplicity” is one of the fundamental words in the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy”, where it is always to be interpreted as a transparency and openness to human understanding. We must say, then, that a properly understood rationality is one of the main ideas of the Council.… But we had more or less forgotten that man understands not only with his reason but also with his senses and his heart; and we are only now gradually beginning to learn that, in pruning, we must distinguish between the wheat and the cockle; that we must not take the embryo as our norm but must allow ourselves to be guided by the law of life.

See: Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 373–76

 Ratzinger, J., Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year (ed. I. Grassl) (San Francisco 1992) 309-310.