(LifeSiteNews) — On occasion of a recent Fatima Center conference, I remembered something that my late husband, Dr. Robert Hickson, used to tell me. When he was a young cadet at West Point between 1960 and 1964, he was blessed with some good Jesuit chaplains. And while the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was going on, these priests told my husband about one participant at the Council: Abbe Victor-Alain Berto. This peritus of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the then-Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, had written a letter about the events at the Council in 1963 that was widely circulated. It was read by the priests at West Point who in turn shared the content with my future husband. His letter included a sharp critique of the Council Fathers for having voted in favor of discarding a schema particularly dedicated to the Blessed Mother. In light of the desire to have more dialogue with Protestants, some modernist-minded participants at the Council had successfully argued that the theme of the Mother of God should be more hidden and “tucked under,” as my husband used to put it, the general topic of the Church.
On October 29, 1963, the Council Fathers were presented with the following question: “Does it please the Council Fathers that the schema on the Most Holy Virgin Mary be revised so as to become Chapter 6 of the Schema on the Church?” There were 1,114 council fathers who voted in favor of this proposal and 1,074 against it.
Abbe Berto was shocked by the decision. In his letter that was then circulating in Catholic circles, he began by saying that the work at the Council in Rome has “been painful” and adding that he “wept” after the votes of October 29 and 30.
“The chastisement of God will come from these votes,” Berto predicted. “The fate of the session was settled that day in heaven where reigns a Son who wills that no one insult His Mother. The chastisement is this awful mess.”
It is painful to read, many decades later, how this clergyman foresaw that God would not be pleased by a Church event that seemed to be embarrassed about Our Lady. He felt strong remorse over this event, writing, “I accuse myself and want to accuse myself before the whole world for having doubted, doubted of the love of Our Lord for His Mother, and doubted the action He would take to avenge her honor. Vengeance has been prompt: the Council has been going mad for six weeks, and it will be a mild vengeance if it stops there.”
Abbe Berto saw immediately a link between this vote at the Council and the role that Our Lady played at the marriage feast at Cana, as described in the Gospels, where it was the Blessed Mother herself who encouraged her Son to start His public life by working His first miracle when turning water into wine. Berto wrote:
The grievous vote of 29th October 1963 apostatizing the Gospel of the Wedding Feast at Cana, far from inviting the Virgin Mary, had signified to her to leave. She hampered! The Virgin Mary hampered the Council which invited her to leave. Oh, she wasn’t asked twice. The earth did not tremble, lightning didn’t strike St Peter’s. The Virgin Mary left discreetly in profound silence, only so discreetly, in a silence so profound, that the words ‘Vinum non habent’ (They have no wine) remained unsaid, and the fate of the second session had been sealed.
What this priest reminds us of here is the essential fact that Our Lady plays an enormous role in the history of salvation of mankind as Mediatrix of All Graces. It was through her intervention that Our Lord turned water into wine. And so it is still today. If we do not honor the Mother of God, her Son will not be pleased. And so Berto adds a little later in his letter, in light of the fact that Our Lady was asked to leave the Council: “The Blessed Virgin having nothing to say, Jesus has done nothing. The water remained water, not even potable water, but wash-water just as at Cana … ”
He added, “Rather than demanding on their knees in solemn supplication that she pronounce the ‘They have no wine’ they have formally declared her annoying, embarrassing, a hindrance before her Son, she, the Spouse of the Holy Spirit. We should know that to show the Blessed Virgin the door at an ecumenical Council is an act that can have consequences, and may not be ratified by Him Who has opened the gates of heaven to her.” The consequence, as Abbe Berto saw it, was that the Holy Ghost was not inclined to assist a Council that was embarrassed by His spouse.
Berto wrote, “One has to see further than the end of one’s nose and should not expect to have a right to the Holy Spirit, on demand, from the moment one is a Council.” On the contrary, he added, the Holy Ghost is awaiting “the Council being celebrated in the manner of the Cenacle ‘cum Maria matre Jesu’ (with Mary the Mother of Jesus).” That is to say, since she was not asked to be present, she did not approach Jesus for help. And He could not advance His Work, according to Abbe Berto, whose final words in this famous letter were: “Jesus has not advanced that hour because the Holy Virgin did not ask it of Him.”
And indeed, the loss of faith since the Second Vatican Council has been immense. Europe has been nearly completely secularized. The Council Fathers did not ask Our Lady to come to the marriage feast of Cana.
When my husband discussed this letter with a Jesuit priest, Father Robert Bradley, S.J., in the 1980s, Fr. Bradley added another striking element to the story of the Council. When Paul VI, toward the end of the Council, announced that he decided to honor Our Lady under the title “Mater Ecclesiae,” Mother of the Church, the priest, himself present at St. Peter’s at that moment, heard an “audible hiss” throughout the basilica.
As my husband used to say: from “they asked the Blessed Mother to leave the marriage feast of Cana” to the “audible hiss” at St. Peter’s.
May the Catholic world as a whole now return more fully to Our Lady, the Mother of God, asking her for help to restore the Catholic faith throughout the Catholic Church worldwide. And one of the best way of doing it is to daily say the Rosary and to practice the Five Saturday devotion as presented to us by Our Lady of Fatima.
