The Great Good Friday Vatican II Rant

Vatican II in a snapshot

I have written a blog post about Pope Benedict’s words concerning the Heresy in Austria.

On the same occasion, though, the Pontiff expressed himself about Vatican II in a way I feel obliged to comment upon. Those who think a Catholic blogger should not comment on Pope’s declarations other than in the most subservient of terms can click away now.

The Holy Father is at this point talking about the Austrian heresy, and asks the rhetorical question whether orthodoxy does not bring to unintended or unwholesome consequences. His words are as follows (emphases mine):

Let us ask again: do not such reflections serve simply to defend inertia, the fossilization of traditions? No. Anyone who considers the history of the post-conciliar era can recognize the process of true renewal, which often took unexpected forms in living movements and made almost tangible the inexhaustible vitality of holy Church, the presence and effectiveness of the Holy Spirit. And if we look at the people from whom these fresh currents of life burst forth and continue to burst forth, then we see that this new fruitfulness requires being filled with the joy of faith, the radicalism of obedience, the dynamic of hope and the power of love.

The thinking here, as I understand it, is as follows: if we remain orthodox we are not going to generate inertia and fossilisation (British English spelling on my blog, thanks…). This is proved by Vatican II and the years that followed it, so rich in true spiritual renewal engendered by the Holy Spirit.

I must, respectfully, disagree on this. Whenever I look, I find Vatican II and the years that followed only brought devastation, which often took entirely expected forms of heresy, contributed to countless souls being lost, almost completely destroyed Catholicism’s cultural patrimony and traditions, almost completely killed catechesis, and left a spiritual wasteland on its trail. 

 If you ask me, the Pontiff’s words beautifully express, and I say this in the most respectful manner but also with no falseness, everything that is wrong with the Vatican today. There is, fifty years after the catastrophe started, still no desire to see what immense disaster was put in motion when Vatican II was started. On the contrary, there are desperate attempts to still try to portray it as something positive, as a phase of renewal. Vatican II (both in its weak, approval seeking and badly worded documents and in the mentality it engendered) was, as they say,  wreckovation rather than renovation.  It was an unmitigated failure, a stupid (no, let me reword it: stupid) attempt at self-destruction in a senseless quest for popularity and consensus, a disgraceful selling out to secular fashions. 

The Pope who spoke the words mentioned above presides over a Catholic world whose members in their vast majority do not even to go Mass; who couldn’t tell you the Ten Commandments to save their lives; who have almost no notion of the works of mercy or of other mainstay of traditional Catholic thinking; who barely know what a Rosary, or a Vesper is; who have such a superficial notion of Catholicism that they couldn’t tell you where the differences with Protestants lie; who have such a superficial notion of Christianity that they couldn’t tell you why contraception is wrong, or premarital sex; who couldn’t formulate in a halfway acceptable way why the Church does not contemplate “women priests”;  who know next to nothing about Catholic teaching on wealth, capital punishment, war; who couldn’t even tell you what Mass is, or what a sin is. My dear readers, I could go on for a long time, but this is everyday experience if you live in any but the most traditionally Catholic countries, at least in the West.

All this is the fruit of Vatican II. If the Church is alive today it is not because of Vatican II, but notwithstanding it. We see the Holy Spirit at work in the Church because we saw Vatican II trying to kill Her, and failing. 

This Pontiff and the men he has around him are unable – or unwilling – to see all this. They are unable to see the Vatican II “experiment” has failed, and has failed miserably. They are unable to see that it had to fail, because it was unCatholic from the start. Instead, we are dished the same rhetoric we have been fed for the last fifty years. At this point, every defence of Vatican II seriously reminds me of a North Korean PR exercise.

The long and painful, but necessary work of disintoxication from Vatican II will not start with this pontificate, possibly not even with the next. But it will come one day, and on that day Catholicism will finally behold the horror, and the immense stupidity, of it all and look back in shame at not one, but several generations of Churchmen abetting such devastation of Catholic patrimony.

I have, and no one of us conservative Catholic can have, the shadow of a doubt about the indefectibility of the Church, and the constant protection the Holy Ghost gives her.

We only have to look at Vatican II.

Mundabor