Over at the recently re-activated (and re-named) blog, What’s Up With Francis-Church, my pal Hilary White returns to her years’ long theme, “Novusordoism Isn’t Catholicism,” with a post on where Mother Angelica went wrong when she declared war against the American Catholic establishment in 1993. She begins with a video clip of a famous episode of Mother Angelica Live! — the one in which Mother rails against the corrupt, anti-Christic liberalism of the contemporary Church.
The precipitating factor was, as you may recall, the choice to have a woman play Christ during the living stations of the cross at World Youth Day in Denver in 1993.
Oddly enough, this was also a pivotal moment in my own life.
I was present at the event, and remember being dumbstruck when I realized what was happening. That trip to Denver was, on the whole, a huge eye-opener for my 15-year-old self. I was confronted with the depth of the corruption of faith in laity and clergy alike. It was a constant barrage of jarring circumstances. The first night I was there, a producer from the Howard Stern Show who couldn’t find a place to stay stowed away in my room after becoming chummy with my assigned roommates, who were apparently big fans. The next morning, at breakfast, I wound up in an argument with a chaperon who thought that if we had to genuflect before the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, we should also genuflect to each other, because “Jesus is in all of us.” When I looked to a priest for backup, he balked. After visiting the hotel pool a few nights during my stay, I later found out that the men from our group I’d seen hanging out in the hot tub with women in bikinis were actually priests from our diocese — a realization that came when they finally put their clerics on for the first time during the papal Mass. Of course, the biggest indicator was probably the pre-trip retreat at the local seminary, where the priest offering Mass for our group ordered us to stand during the consecration (I refused) and said something about “Jesus, he or she as the case may be…”
But I had traveled thousands of miles to see the pope. In my world, he was still seen as the center of Catholic life, the shining bastion of orthodoxy. And on the night that was supposed to mark his first appearance, there she was, some chick playing Jesus, and I was mad as hell.
I knew nothing at the time about Mother Angelica’s own response. Nor did I know that I was, at the time, laboring under the same faulty assumptions she expressed during her diatribe that day. Hilary explains:
This is Mother Angelica’s big moment, her declaration of war against the evil men we had been stuck with for bishops. And they took her up on the offer of hostilities. And she lost, but only after putting up years of the most ferocious fight, and only after they had to pile on with the full force of their powers against her.
This is the speech that really alerted the bishops to the fact that there were still Catholics out there, that their Revolution hadn’t worked. She gave it after what she saw as the last straw: World Youth Day in Denver they gave us a woman acting the part of Christ in the Stations of the Cross. After that she went to war.
But she lost. And do we know why? Because she started with an error. At the beginning of this speech she recites the creed of the American Novusordoist conservatives: Vatican II was wonderful, but those wicked “liberals” highjacked it for their own evil purposes. It is a position that tried to create the compromise space that many American Catholics have tried to live in ever since.
It was this reasonable, nice, friendly, ecumenical position that made it possible for the Catholic leaders of the original pro-life movement of the 70s and 80s to draw in the conservative Protestants; all on the mutual unspoken agreement that we would set aside and never mention the irreconcilable breach between us. It is this false position, this “conservative” middle ground, founded on the new pseudo-doctrine of papal positivism that is now being closed with a resounding clang by the current regime. The old nostrum, the central conservative Novusordoist error of papal positivism: “I’m with the pope and whatever the pope says goes,” is being shown to be a false turn now.
As Ross Douthat said recently, there are roughly three positions in the American Catholic Church (and this spreads up into Canada – though much less in Britain, Australia, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia than most Americans understand). There are “liberals” of the Mahoney/Danneels/Bernardin ilk; the whole spectrum of Traditionalists from the SSPX to the Remnant followers (sedes are in a class of their own); and the conservatives, represented by the George Weigel/First Things/EWTN variety. Among these last have fallen the little group of what we have come to call Papal Apologists – the self-appointed priesthood who have tasked themselves with interpreting and explaining away Pope Francis’ every incomprehensible Pythian utterance.
But this third group, the ones who offered such a pleasing compromise, are the ones who are currently suffering the most. They are the ones who, having adopted the Conservative Novusordoist Creed recited by Mother Angelica at the start of that speech, are now thrown into confusion, frantically denying what is unfolding before their eyes because it fails to fit into their parameters.
The problems with Vatican II aren’t just issues of interpretation. They’re baked right in. Countless other books and articles have tackled these topics, so I’m not going to rehash them here. Perhaps the least polemical and most substantive look at these issues is Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s call for a new syllabus of errors on the council. One could certainly take the criticism further, and some have. Michael Davies researched and exposed a great deal of the manipulation and corruption that went on in the early days of the council.
What matters is this: when you believe something is good, but it keeps producing bad fruit, it creates an irreconcilable problem. You’re always looking to square that circle, always trying to find a way to spin straw into gold.
A year before I went to World Youth Day, I fell to my knees in my little rural parish and asked God to help me to keep my faith in a Catholicism that “doesn’t act like it believes what it says it believes.” He answered that prayer, leading me not just to Denver to see how bad things were up close and personal, but through a labyrinthine maze of experiences that ultimately led me out from the tiny stream of Catholicism I had known, and into the ocean of Catholic Tradition.
It is vital for all Catholics to see the Second Vatican Council for what it was: the most significant thrust in a centuries-long attempt to destroy Catholicism from within. (You can read some of the history on that here.) What the revolutionaries at the council failed to recognize — and still do, as their time bombs continue to explode half a century later — is that the Church truly is divinely-instituted, and thus, indestructible. But to be unable to destroy a thing with finality is not the same as to be unable to damage it severely.
And damage the Church they have.
It is long past time that we abandon the idea of a need to “correctly implement” the council. Its documents, at times orthodox, at other times vague or even apparently contradictory to previous teachings, were designed with flaws capable of being exploited. Its genius is that it cannot be summarily condemned as a compendium of heretical ideas; it would be more true to say that it is a collection of half-formed or ill-stated ones — mixed with enough assertions of authentic Catholic teaching to give the whole enterprise credibility. Remember: a thing needn’t be completely corrupt to present a problem. A house built on sand is still a house – at least until it weakens enough to collapse.
The post-conciliar experiment is now rapidly approaching that point.
Those who are fans of the present pontificate will often say, “Francis isn’t doing anything different than his last three predecessors.” While this isn’t entirely true, there is a thread of similarity, a trend line that can be traced through all the post-conciliar popes. A Franciscan pontificate is not possible in a Church without a Vatican II.
The sooner we stop trying to contort ourselves into seeing the council as a boon for the Church, the better.
Mother Angelica isn’t perfect nor is she is brightest intellectual. She doesn’t have degrees or pedigree and yes there are things she has gotten wrong. Don’t we all? Yet, her love of Jesus and her dedication to Him are the kind rarely seen. Perhaps you can write a piece about that? Too bad she is no longer speaking, let alone broadcasting. I’d love to see the two of you debate. That would be great theatre and you might learn something from her. I think Jesus has forgiven her for giving a nod to V2. Will you?
Steve doesn’t appear to be holding a grudge against Mother Angelica — merely pointing out her error. She started the war on the wrong premise, and a lot of well-meaning Catholics followed her. It’s time for a lot of us to correct our course. I made the same errors until close to a decade ago. It’s a huge leap for a believing Catholic to think that the documents produced from an ecumenical council might be fatally flawed, and should be thrown out. All those in the “conservative” faction need to be called out for their own sake, and for the sake of Holy Mother Church.
Thank you, Aaron. I was wrong and have apologized. I misunderstood.
Aaron is absolutely right. I loved Mother Angelica. Still do. She fought the good fight with what she knew, and paved the way for people like me to do what I do.
We were hoodwinked, almost all of us. I was lucky enough to be born at a time that I came of age as resources were being made available to help me see it.
I’ve always heard that Mother wasn’t just ill; she was forced into silence in what amounted to a hostile takeover of EWTN. Are the rumors true? I don’t know. But this is a hard business, bristling with enemies. It’s certainly not a far-fetched story.
She wanted to turn the reins over to a group of laity. I don’t believe it was a ‘hostile’ take-over but these people gradually sold out Catholicism to the Catholicism-lite we see now on EWTN. This book has some background, EWTN, A Network Gone Wrong.
She was forced to turn it over to a group of laity to keep it out of the hands of the Bishops. Then the laity she trusted was slowly replaced with those who do the bidding of the USCCB and the CCM.
Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking she happily turned over control.
It’s all laid out in Arroyo’s book.
I stand corrected and offer my apologies to you, Steve. I misunderstood – it isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last! Yes, I have heard that Mother Angelica was forced into silence as well. She had held on very tightly to the network so that it would become tainted. It is documented in her biographies. I do apologize. I have a deep love for and appreciation of this woman whose love of Christ has touched my life very personally and this blinded my understanding of the point you were trying to make.
I was also firmly in the “conservative novus ordo” camp when I first returned to the Faith. It took some years for the answers of this faction to start looking flimsy and in some cases outright contradictory. Some years more were required to sort out exactly what the problem was. I ended up a Trad only because one day I found myself standing in that end of things after having spent many years following the evidence, both of authentic Catholic teaching and logic. In fact, I was a Trad long before I knew what it was, and had to have a friend explain to me why I could no longer continue to follow the “conservative” party line.
Also, I have talked with people who were with Mother Angelica in her monastery and had been with her for decades, and it is certainly true that there was a take-over by those more favourable to the bishops and more unfavourable to Tradition. There were other problems, but that part is true. Spare a prayer for that monastic family that was once going so strong. I have heard that they are in difficulties, even with vocations, which used not to be lacking.
Same for me. I was about to enter the seminary as a conservative Novus Ordo type, but something felt… wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it. At communal recitation of the office, something felt missing. At meetings with the Archbishop, the same. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was me.
Years later, I attended an indult mass. It all began to make sense. I was robbed of the whole of Catholic tradition. It took me a couple more years to realize Vatican II was a disaster, most of the bishops hate anything our great-grandparents would have recognized as Catholicism, etc.
I think when the barque of Peter rights itself again, Mother Angelica could be canonized.
Absolutely, Maggie. Absolutely.
My sentiments from another blog:
We know the Church had a council, I haven’t heard from any of our recent Peter’s say that it was heretical, scripture was not abused or challenged, mass was not abolished, doctrine was not changed, the wind of the world swept into the 60’s with a hurricane, sweeping up marriage, purity, sanctity, sanity and hurled it into a crumpled society, we are still cleaning up from the mess when earthquakes rock us with more damage to our fragile self image of human. We are a mess and we can’t keep up with hauling away the trash from each disaster, society is barely holding on with a finger to the hand of Christ, will we let go, the storms cannot break or move the rock of refuge. If we do not have Christ and his Church we’re screwed, had they been closed or dysfunctional during this time of trial, we would have been Satan food, truth has never left the flock. The flock and shepherds can beat against the rock all they want, it won’t crack, …truth ,doctrine, food, has always been supplied to the flock with no amount of whiners.
*****From another post:
I think there is a mentality within the Church to look at the last 50 years and not see the Church but all her human elements who have acted
out with disobedience, disregard and disrespect. Not all have defaced the image of the Church and her teachings. How many laity have taken the
image of the Church and have step on it before the crowds, how many clergy have hurled mud upon the sacred with the cheering of the multitudes. An apostasy reflects badly on the Church, people doubt her perfection, her wisdom in guiding the people through the desert into the promised land, she is viewed as imperfection by association with her members, weak for letting Judas among her elite, faith shakes many away
for the contradictions unreconciled now, the cross before the resurrection will usher her truimph, the Church will follow her Lord.
***(just wrote this before this article came out) There are some catholic websites all is gloom and doom since 1968, we live in a gloom and doom world but we still manage to appreciate the good or else become very cynical, you and I know these people, everything is basically a bitch & complaint.
****
My thoughts now, I don’t agree with ‘wow is us until Vatican11 is condemn, the mass restored,’ but its a song only heaven will be able to turn off, of course, many believe No! Heaven says sing it louder, Francis is our proof of the disaster, 50 years is proof of the disaster, undo it! Sing it before the throne, its a tune that might not be pleasing to the ears of Heaven, my ears which are catholic too don’t march to this drumbeat, thank you for letting me share this long post and I truly wish all here a blessed faith experience, your mission is not my mission for what I perceive to be the good of the Church.
Our beloved Church, given us by Christ Himself, has been greatly wounded but thank God there is a lot of healing going on. The Traditional Mass and celebrations are a safe home for more and more Catholics. We must be grateful to two post conciliar Popes who steered us back through –
1. Pope St. John Paul II enabling the establishent of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. and
2. Pope Benedict XVI issuing the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum – which pushed non- conforming disobedient bishops aside (though the FSSP like to keep a working friendship with their local ‘authority’). We are now benefitting. The wound is felt when we have no regular access to Latin Mass and must go to a N.O. – so banal in its mode. Sorry Lord Jesus.
I highly recommend everyone check out Chris Ferrara’s book – ‘EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong.’
Mother Angelica tried to fight back. But she was defeated due to certain strategic errors. It’s not her fault, she couldn’t have foreseen where things would go, but none the less, the devil is extremely cunning.
I don’t think Humanae Vitae should be thrown out. It still is a wonderful document, and a beacon for the world today. [I assume Humanae Vitae was part of the Vatican II documents. We studied it when I was a teenager, and I was blown away by it. It resonated so much with me.]
I think other items should be reviewed:
What is ecumenism, and its purpose? Does it dilute the teaching of the Church, given to us by Christ?
What did the Church Fathers mean when they said no salvation outside the [Catholic Church?]
I have many more questions.
Humanae Vitae is a papal encyclical published in 1968, approximately three years after Vatican II closed. So it is not part of the Vatican II documents.
Your other questions are some of the very ones that most Traditionalists believe were answered wrongly by Vatican II. The more I study history, the more I agree with the Traditionalist view.
God bless!
And as wonderful as Humanae Vitae is, it inverted the purposes of marriage, the first of which is to have children (and educate them).
The only real problem with Humanae Vitae is that it was largely redundant and ineffective. The whole problem could have been served by a papal bull stating:
In fact, the lack of “anathema sit” in the better declarations by the last few popes is troubling.
I entered The Church last year and my mentor gave me a copy of Humanae Vitae and I was blown away by the CC teaching on contraception….never heard about it. While I agree that the papal bull you suggest would be good for Catholics, HV can be a great tool for Protestants, which I am surrounded. If only they would read it…..to my knowledge not one of my Protestant family or friends has read it. I beg and challenge them to research that all Christians less than 100 years ago KNEW contraception was sin….and they still refuse. I don’t understand it.
Yes, you are certainly correct about that.
Very good Steve. Vatican II is a council that should never have happened. Why God permitted such an evil is a mystery. But ultimately it will be seen as necessary in the plan of salvation.
For more on Vatican II there is Father Gregory Hesse’s critique in six CD’s available at http://www.oltyn.org Also, a study of changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th Century in a book called ‘Iota Unum’ by Romano Amerio.
This is a time of trial where even the ‘elect’ can be led astray. It is a hard time for those used to depending on ‘the Vatican’ for the right way of things. But we have a Vatican that is earth bound and shows pictures of lions on St. Peter’s on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and etc. So the sheep are confused. It was always the safest way to follow the pope but we do not know where the pope is taking us. Celebrate luther? Do not judge anything? Not mentioning Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? We try to cling to the age old teachings but not everyone can escape to trad land.
Yes, very true. But we should help folks not to be mislead by the secular direction coming from the Vatican.
If the Church which is endowed by Christ himself with the charism of infallibity can so be shaken – perhaps she is now undergoing the passion that she has to pass through – with posts like these [http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2309-the-new-rosary-it-s-time-to-say-goodbye] do you think the Trads will fair better?
Here’s a question for those who advocate “throwing out” the documents of Vatican II:
If these documents were thrown out (whatever that means, maybe disavowed by Church authorities), what would change? Would anything be different? I don’t see how anything would be different. The experience most people have of the Church – Sunday or daily Mass, sacraments, religious education, music, groups or ministries operating out of the parish – none of these would be different. The organization of the Church, how priests and deacons are trained and assigned – no changes.
I know a lot of commenters at this and similar blogs have complaints/grudges/suggestions for change – no extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist for instance – but I don’t see how repudiation of Vatican II is going to give you what you want.
Most Catholics don’t even realize that we are in a war for the heart of
the Church. And if they did, they wouldn’t want any part of it. Over
the years they have developed a great Protestant-like tolerance for all
kinds of beliefs about God, sin and salvation and would probably say,
like another Hillary, what difference does any of this make? Tolerance
and comfort are the enemies of Truth. Nothing less that Divine
intervention is going to wake folks from their religious lethargy.
Did you mean this as a response to my post? It has nothing to do with my post.
Really?
Yes, really. I guess you were responding to Aaron Traas’s post, which I didn’t see earlier.
It would deflate the efforts of misguided “conservative” laity and clergy that say we need to reconcile with the world. I think what would happen is about 50% would stop calling themselves Catholic, and possibly depart to other faiths, about 20% would keep doing what they were doing, insisting that the church is wrong and the documents shouldn’t be thrown out, and the remaining 30% would be honest with themselves for the first time and become trads.
With respect to the liberals, nothing would change. They’d continue to have passionate love for the spirit of Vatican II. But other than the liberals wearing bishop’s hats, they’re irrelevant.
Average pew-sitting Catholic: no change, except accelerated declines in numbers as the former conservatives exit their parishes at a more rapid rate.
I don’t think I understand you, Aaron. You are saying that if the Vatican II documents are thrown out, then 50% would stop calling themselves Catholic, and possibly depart to other faiths. And yet you approve of the idea to throw out Vatican II? You admit there would be a decline in the pews, but you want this to happen?
And I guess you are admitting there would be no change in liturgy, governance, education, teachings if the Vatican II documents were ditched. No reason to think there would be visible changes at all.
If they are willing to leave, they’re unlikely to be maintaining a state of grace. They gain no benefit by being in the church and acting as apologists for those who attack her. The ones who are sincere and duped will stay, assuming they aren’t too prideful.
The changes in the liturgy, governance, etc. will only happen when the vast majority of people fighting to keep the status quo of the march into oblivion stop doing so. This will happen in the following forms:
– some will die off
– some will leave the church
– some will become trads
Throwing out the VII documents will hasten all but the first.
There is no overnight fix. If we had a pope that rejected the council publicly, deprecated the new mass, shut down all perfidious religious orders and seminaries, wrote a new syllabus of errors, anathematized all the Kasperites, etc., it would still take decades for the church to claw it’s way back. There are entire generations, like mine, that are “figuring out” traditional living because it wasn’t passed on to us. There are so many fractions among trads with differing ideas and problems. The trad understanding of the proper role of government and economics varies from laissez-faire capitalism to European-style socialism. There is so much devastation. Any progress will be slow and messy. But it would be best to start by rejecting obviously problematic things.
I think what is so difficult to face is that the Church will crumble before our eyes, and in the not too distant future. We just don’t want to believe that will happen. We really are rearranging the chairs on the deck of a sinking ship.
Of course the Faith will never disappear – Our Lord guaranteed it would not. He also asked if He would find Faith on the earth when He returns. How do we reconcile these two? I think He was warning us that MOST Christians would lose the Faith, but that His grace would always be offered to the few willing to embrace it.
If you have a “syllabus of errors” as Bp. Schneider has suggested, then your local parish will change over time from a “Man centered” community to a community where Christ is King.
The blending of Catholic and Protestant programs, the watering down of the liturgy to the point that it looks like the Lutheran service up the street, will go away. When we become Christ centered as the Eastern rite Catholics are, we stop losing people to the Megachurch up the street. That’s how it will change. It will take time, but it will bring Catholics back to being Catholic.
Yeah… We were having kind of a party on Shrove Tuesday. Lots of 80s punk and halfway decent Umbrian white, and I just found myself yelling at the innernet again.
Maybe the fit will pass.
Some ask why God has allowed Vatican II and the damage it has caused, it is simple. Once the protection of the Church’s traditions were removed, the true faith and desires of men were allowed to come out. When we question whether people are basically good, all we have to do is look at what happens when the rules are removed. Most become like animals, only interested in selfish desires, money, sex, and fun are all they live for.
The fact is that we must accept the inevitable. As Pope Benedict said, the Church will become much smaller. Under Pope Francis the seminaries will start closing again, priests and sisters will start leaving again, millions of the laity will not see the reason to bother with going to Mass and being part of the ‘new church’ that believes that everyone goes to heaven and sin and Satan are fables. Jesus Christ and the fathers of the Church warned us that this time would come. It appears to be here now.
Pope Francis and the Vatican II crowd, for good or bad has been allowed by God and each person will have to respond. Will they turn away from the truths of the Church and grab the ‘New Church’ where the only rules are not to condemn sin and not to teach truth. We are adults and we must be like the early Christians facing up to the Jews. They followed Christ as he was attacked by God’s religion at the time, the Jews, as their families condemned them for their following this Jesus Christ instead of the Jewish faith. They died for their faith in Christ, not Judaism, will we die for our faith in Christ, not Relativism (the ‘New Church’ creed).
My experience in the ‘New Church’ seems to be much different than yours. Because I see that American Seminary enrollment is now at the highest level it has been in 50 years, right? And that rather than leaving, priests are being encouraged to live their vocation to the full. And that Bishops are being challenged to engage the world around them, care for the poor, and actually preach Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. And that thousands of young Catholics are dedicating to their lives to serve the Church in organizations such as LifeTeen, NET, FOCUS, and Totus Tuus. And that those young Catholics are being transformed by the grace of Christ and spreading that message to friends and parish communities. And that people are MORE encouraged to go to Mass because they now know that Mass is a place of encounter with the grace and love of Jesus, not just a mindless ritual.
Things seem to be looking up on my end.
This is the result of hard work on the part of Pope Benedict and Pope John all Ii, not due to the Pope Francis effect. My friends in seminary report a drop off in new seminarians in many more progressive diocese. Currently the liberal diocese I live in has no seminarians except an elderly deacon whose wife died who wants to become a priest. Yet the traditional order that pastors our parish is seeing ever more growth. Those organizations you mention are great and very fruitful but the more liberal bishops will not welcome them in. I guess groups like Focus are too Catholic for them. So the growth will continue to be in conservative diocese and bear Holy fruit but I fear for those good Catholics who live in spiritual deserts.
But you assume that these “conservative” dioceses are living in some mythical past – ignoring Church teachings from the past 50 years and acting as if Pope Francis doesn’t exist. That is not my experience. Pope Benedict and JP2 helped shape and implement the teaching of Vatican 2. Those organizations I mentioned are living out the call for lay holiness that was re-emphasized at the Council and emphasized by Francis (along with JP2 and BXVI). My friends are now responding to Pope Francis’ call to read the Gospels daily. They are giving more time and money to organizations that serve the poor and neglected. They are spending more time in prayer and growing in holiness.
You assume that “Pope Francis and the Vatican 2 crowd” are the antithesis of your heralded “conservative” Bishops/Dioceses. That isn’t the case. Growth will continue to occur in ‘conservative’ dioceses because they preach the eternal truth of Christ’s Church AND humbly submit themselves to the self-examination that Pope Francis asks all of us to engage in.
Apologies for potentially setting off a chicken-or-the-egg style discussion, but how could Vatican II be the source of the problem? Weren’t all of the bishops who voted at the council catechized before Vatican II? Didn’t they all take the oath against modernism? Didn’t they all celebrate the Mass of Ages, ad orientam, in Latin, and pray the Divine Office daily?
And yet, here are the voting totals on each of the Vatican II documents:
Constitutions:
Dei Verbum (On Divine Revelation): 2344-6 [99.74%]
Lumen Gentium (On the Church) : 2151-5 [99.77%]
Gaudium et Spes (On the Church in the Modern World): 2307-75 [96.85%]
Sacrosanctum Concilium (On the Sacred Liturgy): 2147-4 [99.81%]
Declarations:
Dignitatis Humanae (On Religious Liberty): 2308-70 [97.06%]
Gravissimum Educationis (On Christian Education): 2290-35 [98.49%]
Nostra Aetate (On the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions): 2221-88 [96.19%]
Decrees:
Ad Gentes (On Missionary Activity of the Church): 2394-5 [99.79%]
Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity): 2340-2 [99.91%]
Christus Dominus (On the Pastoral Office of Bishops): 2319-2 [99.91%]
Inter Mirifica (On the Media of Social Communications): 1960-164 [92.28%]
Optatem Totius (On Priestly Training): 2318-3 [99.87%]
Orientalium Ecclesiam (On the Eastern Catholic Churches): 2210-39 [98.27%]
Perfectae Caritatis (On the Adaption and Renewal of Religious Life): 2321-4 [99.82%]
Presbtyerorum Ordinis (On the Ministry and Life of Priests): 2390-4 [99.83%]
Unitatis Redintegratio (On Ecumenism): 2137-11 [99.49%]
Assuming, hypothetically, that the Second Vatican Council was repudiated in the same way as the Second Ephesian Council, and we rolled the clock back to 1962 — wouldn’t that still leave us with a hierarchy where 96% of the bishops would vote to approve the following sentence:
“Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination.” [NOSTRA AETATE, p.2]
Isn’t Vatican II a symptom of a deeper problem, that’s been growing since the so-called “Enlightenment”, where phenomenology is the only kind of knowledge that matters, and each man is the origin and center of his own universe?
I didn’t say it was the source of the problem. I said:
“It is vital for all Catholics to see the Second Vatican Council for what it was: the most significant thrust in a centuries-long attempt to destroy Catholicism from within.”
Then I linked to our three-part series on the Alta Vendita and the long march to infiltrate and destroy the Church from within.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth (keyboard?). These are confusing times, and like many, I would be comforted to find clear-cut and simple explanations. In this regard, there is a lot of focus in Traditional spheres on Vatican II (and above, with such language as “Conciliar Stories,” “Novusordoism,” “post-conciliar experiment,” “post-conciliar popes,” etc.) as the source / inflection point / high-water mark / what have you, from which the good is chronologically separated from the bad. But don’t the vote totals indicate that the real damage was done _long_ before? And if that’s the case, doesn’t that erode confidence in earlier documents / teachings? For example, in the 1954 edition of My Catholic Faith, available from Angelus Press, there’s a lot of rah-rah-American-democracy, and laughable conflations of Scholasticism and the rebellion-as-virtue laid down in the Declaration of Independence (see attached). So how far back do we have to look for safe and secure guidance? What teaching can we trust? Do we have to, as St. Vincent would recommend, weigh every teaching from the last two or three hundred years according to the procedure of the Commonitorium? I’d be happy to learn that there are easy answers to these questions, but they’re mostly a rhetorical cri de cœur directed to what I would hope would be a sympathetic audience.
In addition to what Steve just said, the whole “rolling the clock back” canard is really tired. When the council of Nicea, in 325 AD, denounced Arianism, did it “roll the clock back” to 250 AD? Did Trent “roll back the clock” to 1517? Did Apostolicae Curae roll things back to 1662? Did the Index Librorum Prohibitorum roll things back to whenever the books added to it were published?
What a lot of us are calling for is a correction, and a sorely needed one. It has nothing to do with dialing things back. It has to do with setting things right going forward.
Cf. My reply bleow to @skojec:disqus [https://onepeterfive.wpengine.com/christ-is-a-chick-and-other-conciliar-stories/#comment-2509815888]. Card. Burke would agree with your last paragraph.
Is there a concerted effort to destroy the Church? Yes, absolutely. But traditional Catholics need to come to terms with the fact that, for the overwhelming majority of its proponents, Modernism is an attempt to solve a spiritual and intellectual problem of the first order, namely: How can I reconcile my Catholic faith with the findings of “modern” (i.e. post-Enlightenment) science? That’s the elephant in the room, and until that problem is honestly addressed and convincingly solved, the Church will continue to hemorrhage souls. We can talk about beautiful and reverent liturgy and similar issues till we’re blue in the face; if we don’t have a workable, robust solution to that core problem – the Problem of Modernity – it won’t make a damn bit of difference.
The root cause, and not the effects.
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Modernity and who and what is behind it.
“How can I reconcile my Catholic faith with the findings of “modern”
(i.e. post-Enlightenment) science? That’s the elephant in the room, and
until that problem is honestly addressed and convincingly solved, the
Church will continue to hemorrhage souls.”
But of course, no scientific discovery has contradicted the Faith; only certain interpretations thereof, which are always based on false philosophy.
An obvious example is atomism: “everything in the universe is made of atoms” – the true science – “so everything is nothing more than its atoms” – the false philosophy, which does not follow from the data.
The false philosophy continues: “So nothing is really one thing. To take an example at random, an apple isn’t really one thing, but a collection of atoms arranged in a certain way. There is therefore no such thing as an apple, or any discrete object; everything is just a bunch of atoms, ever in flux.”
And the problem has already been ‘honestly addressed an convincingly solved’, long before the so-called Enlightenment. A basic understanding of Thomistic metaphysics make one realise this. But even without this, we can see that atomism is self-contradictory, and therefore false. For his theory to work, the atomist needs to say that the atoms in an apple have a certain arrangement. If he denies atoms have arrangements, then he must say there is nothing to distinguish an apple from anything else, which is clearly nonsense. So he must accept atoms have arrangements.
But he can only describe the arrangement in terms of the whole apple. There is no other way of doing that. The atoms’ arrangement is irreducible to the atoms themselves.
No matter without form, in other words — just as the scholastics have always said. To describe a thing’s atomic makeup is to describe its material cause in great detail, but in no ways undermines its having a formal cause. No amount of wishful thinking on the part of early modern philosophers could change that.
Anyway, this is just one obvious example of a supposed contradiction between the Faith and science, which is actually no such thing. ‘Evolutionism’ is very similar; so are the philosophical appendages to neuroscience; the list could go on. All lies; all from hell.
That’s my point. Catholic intellectuals should be bringing the unshakeable faith and clear thinking of the Fathers and the School to bear upon the icons of the modernity, but instead are, by and large, either silent or busy attempting to demonstrate that Thomism will land you in a position virtually indistinguishable from rank materialism. Case in point: Thomistic Evolution, run by a group of Dominican Friars. Other than the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, I don’t know of any Catholic apostolate which even attempts to expose the errors of the Enlightenment and defend the doctrines of the Faith in regards to Sacred Scripture and creation. Those who feel forced to talk about it are trying hard to convince both Catholics and the world that there is no conflict, though they seem to enjoy making a show of throwing the few faithful Catholics who defend the traditional exegesis of Genesis under the bus. In the abscence of contemporary commentary on origins which is both theologically sound and intellectually satisfying, not a few faithful Catholics feel forced to turn to Protestant apologetic outfits – a move which, more often than not, compounds the problem, as they fail to grasp the problem at its root. If Catholics have a satisfying solution to the Problem of Modernity – and I think we do, at least in rudimentary form – then we’re doing an exceptionally poor job of communicating that answer to the world.
That was in fact the whole point of Vatican II, and although it wasn’t perfect, it did make some real strides toward articulating a Catholic response to Modernity.
It is vital for all Catholics to see the Second Vatican Council for what it was: the most significant thrust in a centuries-long attempt to destroy Catholicism from within.
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Bingo!
It is long past time that we abandon the idea of a need to “correctly implement” the council. Its documents, at times orthodox, at other times vague or even apparently contradictory to previous teachings, were designed with flaws capable of being exploited.
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Ding! Ding!
I was confronted with the depth of the corruption of faith in laity and clergy alike.
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If they die unrepentant, how I dread for them.
This sounds like so much whining.
I was at the 1993 WYD. I took two busses of young adults and teens. We had adoration, prayer groups, accommodations in homes in Littleton, and a fabulous time meeting so many other people from around the world. There was not ONE negative thing mentioned, (except the toilet facilities at the big outdoor mass 🙂 ).
I spoke with an Australian Cardinal, and teens and young adults from around the world. My teens attended the stadium greeting, and prayed and shared in a number of well planned events.
I suppose you were scandalized by what you saw. I wasn’t.
Vatican II was a good council. I am glad it occurred, and I am grateful for the Church. There is no post conciliar experiment. We are Vatican II. All of us. Anyone who says otherwise is simply a whining naysayer.
No. We are Catholic. Entirely Catholic. Anyone who says rather that “we are Vatican II” is worshipping perhaps a document, perhaps an era, perhaps a cultural perspective, but not Christ. As Catholics, to worship Christ fully is to be fully Catholic: there is a continuity implied, not merely a council.
(It also betrays either ignorance of the current scholarship on the dark corners of the council and its movers, or a falsely positive stance purposefully dismissive of real concerns, to call those with rightful concerns “whining naysayers.”)
World Youth Day, on the other hand, is a well intentioned idea. But there is so much pandering to the culture, so much pop-posturing involved, that it doesn’t feel, look, or sound remotely Catholic. That’s my big problem with it.
Emptied the pews and the seminaries, gave lots of ammunition to heretics, confused everyone about the roles of priests, religious, and laity, started the ball rolling towards a liturgy that no Catholic that died prior would ever recognize as a mass… yeah, good council. Time to throw it out.
Adult convert here. It sounds as if you were insulated, perhaps by innocence or ignorance, or a combination of both. Your comment, “We are Vatican II,” made me laugh out loud. That is akin to someone saying at the time of St. Athanasius, “We are all Arians now.” Goodness you have a short-sighted perspective of Holy Mother Church.
Fantastic post
Well that jhas the ring of truth but what on earth do you expect to happen now? After decades of hearing from the highest levels that the Council was a new Pentecost, is it realistic to expect The leadership of the Church to suddenly reverse their position? No that is unlikely to happen at least not in our lifetime. Even if it was an evil Council the fact is nearly all the people with the power in the Church to reverse the damage are still living in the Vatican II fantasy.
You know it’s really tough. I don’t know if I’m lucky that my local parish has very reverent NO liturgy or if the priests are just waiting for us to get comfortable before they come out in tutus.
I read these things and I have no idea what to do.
Even a reverent NO Mass is no comparison to the TLM, in my experience.
I would tend to agree with one exception. It’s my personal opinion, no one has to share it, in a world of church closings that I should do my best to support my local parish especially when I can visably see the good that it does for the parishioners souls and the neighborhood, especially if they are at least very conservative in their NO liturgy.
Perhaps the pastor or one of the priests would be willing to learn the Latin Mass and convert one of the Sunday Masses to the TLM. One of the benefits is that the parish could take in some new members from outside the parish boundaries who would be drawn to the TLM. Of course the spiritual benefits for the parish are enormous, too.
No harm in asking.
“Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears “ [Jeremiah 9:1] and I will weep many days for the people who are being driven to destruction by these vile doctrines. The ears of the simple are being led astray, and have now got used to heretical impiety. The nurslings of the Church are being brought up in the doctrines of iniquity. What are they to do? Our opponents have the command of baptisms; they speed the dying on their way; they visit the sick; they console the sorrowful; they aid the distressed; they give succour of various kinds; they communicate the mysteries. All these things, as long as the performance of them is in their hands, are so many ties to bind the people to their views. The result will be that in a little time, even if some liberty be conceded to us, there is small hope that they who have been long under the influence of error will be recalled to recognition of the truth.
ST. BASIL OF CAESAREA Letter 243
My question- to which I have yet to get a satisfactory answer- is this: If you throw out Vat II, what stops anyone from simply declaring that other ecumenical councils were wrong?
Even if all you do is construct a syllabus of errors, wouldn’t that call the rest into question as well?
Recall, not everyone was happy with the statement on Papal Infallibility in Vat I.
I’ve read the attempts to get around the infallibility of Vat II for years- the “pastoral council” approach, etc. but none seem to work.
Certainly not sure myself how to handle this, but see very bad possiblities in some of the proposed ‘cures’.
So you’re saying there is an empty chair?
You might deny that this is what you’re saying, but there is no other conclusion to be drawn. You are saying that Vatican II consists of poisonous error admixed with orthodox doctrine, so that a spoonful of sugar might make the medicine go down. But the purpose of a Council is to clarify the truth of the faith. Therefore Vatican II is would not be a true Council but an anti-Council (a distortion of the faith rather than a clarification).
Yet John XXIII called the Council and helped to determine the basic shape it took. Paul VI finished the Council and also contributed to shaping it; he then oversaw the liturgical changes stemming from SC.
John Paul I, though only serving for a month, indicated clearly his strong support for the Council by naming himself after the preceding two Popes. John Paul II (who participated actively in the Council as a bishop) did the same by taking this same name, and he spent his entire pontificate championing the message of the Council, in particular the message of Gaudium et spes, even while warning that some false readings of the Council betray its true content. Benedict XVI (who participated actively in the Council as a theological peritus) likewise championed the message of the Council, even more loudly warning that some readings of the Council betray its true content. Francis seems to understand the Council as a blueprint for his papacy, referring to it often.
Your assertion (that Vatican II is poison mixed with orthodox truth, that the Council’s teaching cannot be correctly implemented because it is fundamentally problematic), means, necessarily, that there has not been a true Pope since Pius XII. You may not want to say this; you may not want to embrace a sedevacantist position; but this is unavoidable if you are saying that Vatican II teaches error.
A supposedly ecumenical “Council” that teaches error (even if the error is mixed in with a lot of orthodox statements), is not a Council but an anti-Council. And supposed “Popes” who would not only actively call for and preside over such an anti-Council (John XXIII and Paul VI) but then spend decades promoting its teaching and defending it (John Paul II, Benedict), are therefore not Popes but anti-Popes. And these anti-Popes have compounded the mockery by canonizing each other (Francis canonizing John XXIII and John Paul II). It is not possible for a true Pope to defend and champion an anti-Council; that is nonsense. So your assertion ends with an empty chair; it means that for more than 50 years, the Catholic Church has had no Pope; that every single “Mass” celebrated after the changes under Paul VI is not a true Mass but a demonic mockery (meaning that the vast majority of the Catholic laity have never actually been to Mass); that there have been no saints legitimately canonized, no sacraments received (other than perhaps Baptism and Marriage). In short, the entire billion-member “Catholic Church” is an anti-Church headed by the latest in a series of anti-Popes, except for the small contingent of people who celebrate the Latin Mass (meaning here the actual Mass rather than a fraudulent satanic joke).
I love the Latin Mass, although I primarily participate in Mass in the vernacular. I went to Latin Mass today, and my son served at the altar. But the relatively small contingent of Catholics who celebrate Mass in Latin cannot make a claim to be the last surviving remnant of the true Catholic Church. If the Church has been conquered by Satan, if a whole series of anti-Popes have reigned for more than 50 years and deceived 99% of the Catholic faithful via an anti-Council, then Christ’s promise to Peter is broken.
But his promise is not broken, because ultimately the documents (which are not perfect by any means) do not teach error. Therefore subsequent Popes were not wrong to promote and champion the message of the Council, the center of which is the statement of Gaudium et spes that “it is only in the mystery of the incarnate Logos that the mystery of the human being takes on light,” that we cannot understand the human being except by looking at the God-man Jesus Christ. And so these Popes are true Popes and not anti-Popes; and they shepherd the real Catholic Church, and not some monstrous usurper.
Firsthand accounts of the proceedings in and around the Council (e.g., the recollections of Benedict XVI) make it plain that the whole conciliar process was under direct attack by Satan (the ‘spirit of Vatican II’), and although many of the bishops and theologians at at Council were heretics who fought hard to push the Church over the precipice, nonetheless the Holy Spirit did not allow this to happen. You can be sure that Nicaea was attacked by Satan in a similar manner, and that Council, like this one, occurred during a time of the infiltration of the Church itself, rather than an assault from outside.
The pontificate of Francis seems to be a deliberate attempt to reset the post-Conciliar period, to start from scratch as if it was 1965 again and John Paul II and Benedict XVI had never happened. Whereas John Paul and Benedict sought to combat the distortions that followed the Council, Francis seems to embrace at least some of these distortions. Even so, I know that he is truly the Pope, that the chair is not empty (even though at times it seems as if we’d be better off with an empty chair). The reality of it is that he may be a terrible Pope who leads many to scandal. The Church has survived terrible Popes before, and she will survive whatever Francis does or fails to do.
Oh, there might be an empty chair now that Francis has contradicted infallible teaching, but of course, that’s out of my pay grade to determine.
As for the rest, it does not follow. The SSPX have been arguing cogently about the theological problems with certain aspects of Vatican II for decades. Bishop Schneider has mirrored some of these concerns here:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/bishops/schneider-proposte.htm
Vatican II is far worse as a document that is intended to be exploitable than a document that promotes particular error. There certainly are things in it that are deeply problematic.
But this needn’t lead to sedevacantism. I do think the whole thing could be thrown out and it wouldn’t matter an iota. Where V2 innovated, it made missteps; where it reiterated, it failed to add anything necessary to the depositum fidei. In what way are we better for the council? What did it add to the practice or understanding of the faith that is a positive?
The post above suggests that Vatican II teaches error, that the problems with the documents cannot be resolved by correct interpretation but are “baked right in” (i.e., inherent to the wording of the texts themselves). You didn’t say that V2 teaches a particular heresy. But you are not simply saying that the texts are ambiguous: “There are certainly things in it that are deeply problematic,” which is hard to read as anything but doctrinal error.
I’m not trying to cherry pick this single quote; the whole thrust of the post above (especially the section borrowed from your friend Hilary) is that Vatican II is a false Council, not clarifying the faith but distorting it. If not, why approvingly cite Hilary’s terminology of “Novusordoism” and “Novusordoists” to describe those who celebrate Mass in the form approved by Paul VI as members of a separate religion which is not the Catholic Church?
My point is simple:
(1) If Vatican II is a false and terrible Council, and
(2) If all of the Popes both during and following Vatican II promote and champion the Council as a great blessing and a gift to the Church
(3) Then these Popes are actively complicit — indeed, they are by far the most powerful conspirators — in what you described as “the most significant thrust in a centuries-long attempt to destroy Catholicism from within.”
Popes who consistently support and promote a false Council are false Popes. Who would affirm that a true successor of Peter actively supports and defends a false and enormously harmful pseudo-Council? For example, John Paul II quoted from the Vatican II documents in nearly every encyclical letter he wrote, and made Gaudium et spes central to his papal teaching.
If every Pope from John XXIII on is a huge fan and defender of the Council (which is undeniably the case), and if the Council accomplished nothing good, but deception and destruction, how are they not false Popes? How is the chair not empty?
You say that “The SSPX have been arguing cogently about the theological problems with certain aspects of Vatican II for decades.” But if the texts contain doctrinal errors (which the SSPX maintains), then no true Pope can defend and promote them, at least not in letters with magisterial weight (even if in airplane interviews it seems that even a Pope can teach heresy).
What I’m pointing out is that there are two positions here, one of which leads to an empty chair. (1) If the Council is merely ambiguous and fuzzy, in such a way that it is open to misinterpretation, then there need not be an empty chair. All the post-conciliar Popes would have to be great fools to defend such a mistake; but they would not have to be antipopes. But (2) if the Council mixes error with truth, if it actually contradicts Catholic teaching even in small ways, then the Popes who champion it are not Popes.
As for what the Council contributes that is worthwhile, off the top of my head:
– Lumen Gentium builds on the insight of St. Cyprian that the Church is “a people made one with the unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” articulating a trinitarian account of the mystery of the Church.
– Dei verbum lays out a Catholic response to the 19th century rise of the ‘historical-critical’ approach to Scripture, re-affirming that the study of scripture “is the soul of sacred theology” and that Scripture is truly authored by God and never only by humans, while also taking account of the value of including historical studies, literary genre, etc. in exegesis.
– Gaudium et spes develops a robust Christological anthropology, arguing that the only adequate response to atheist humanism is to show that Christianity is the one true humanism, insofar as Christ reveals the human being to itself even while (and not in spite of) revealing the Father.
– More generally, the Council as a whole is a major contribution to Catholic thought insofar as it is the Church’s response to the post-Enlightenment situation (Modernity), much as Trent was the response to the Protestant crisis.
I hope you understand that I’m not getting into all this to pick a fight. I feel bound to take issue with the wholesale rejection of the Council, even though I certainly agree with Benedict XVI (who was there and who knows what went on at the Council better than either one of us) that the Council is very imperfect. One can see the evidence in the documents of a battle, of a struggle between various factions within the Council. But I would argue that ultimately Modernism did not conquer the Council, and that although the texts are imperfect they are neither heretical nor devoid of value.
I would add that there is an significant confluence between the liberals/progressives and the SSPX – both agree that the Council was a rupture, a breaking of the Tradition. My contention is that both are wrong, and that the Council is no rupture. And with all respect to your friend Hilary, I say this not because I am terrified of a world where the Church has been virtually destroyed since 1962, and exists only as a tiny remnant; I say it because the Council has born good fruit in the form of the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, even though these decades have also been an ongoing struggle between the same factions ranged against one another at the Council. This battle did not end at the Council; it kicked into high gear (which was also largely the case with Nicaea).
Regarding Pope Francis, the situation is difficult to fully assess because we are watching it unfold month by month, and it’s hard to see where it’s all going. I am deeply disturbed by him; I am increasingly concerned that he intends to undermine the Church’s teaching on marriage and family, if not by way of official writing (letters, etc.) then by a pseudo-magisterium of “interviews” and puppet synods.
A perspective from a non-Catholic: The War on Christianity, Part 1 | James Perloff