After “Mad Monday”: A New, Forward-Looking Hermeneutic For The Second Vatican Council.

 

The always attentive reader Rhizotomos directs my attention to a blog called Public Vigil; from what I can see a soundly conservative blog, well worth the reading but exempt from, say, Sedevacantist error. 

The author of the blog is kind enough to mention my little effort, and has some less than very kind, but rather intelligent, words for Pope Ratzinger and his cohort. 

I will profit of these intelligent considerations to spend a couple of words on Cardinal/Pope Ratzinger, and Vatican II in general. By the by, the blog author also spends some words on the “not fooling anyone” matter; his are perfectly understandable objections, but see here and here for my thinking in the matter. 

I have, in the past, compared Ratzinger to Gorbachev: a last attempt, made in good faith, to take the best out of something that is intrinsically wrong. I do not doubt in the least Cardinal/Pope Ratzinger’s good faith, but I think he applied it to the wrong cause. 

Gorbachev tried to save Communism injecting in it elements of sanity, but ultimately failed because Communism is, however you tweak it, insane. Similarly, Ratzinger represents the last attempt to date to extract some “good” from something that is, when we look at it properly, entirely and irredeemably bad. 

Whatever Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope Benedict XVI later proposed to make V II “work” would work much better if V II were to be ditched altogether. The “hermeneutic of continuity” is nothing else than the attempt to beautify the Council with elements of timeless Truth; not only in the liturgy, but in the approach to Church governance, evangelisation, etc. This Truth was there before the Council. What has the council improved? Zippo. What has it damaged? Everything.  

Pope Benedict’s strategy was, just like Gorbachev’s, self-defeating. If the bad of the present needs the good of the past to make it presentable, it is obvious that the exercise as a whole is not presentable. Once again: whatever was good in what Ratzinger proposed was there before V II, and there is no need of V II at all to introduce it.  Actually, everything “good” that he proposed could have been done “better” by entirely ditching V II: liturgically, doctrinally, pastorally, and so on. 

To make the usual, Mundaborian sexist comparison (we need more sexism around; good, old-fashioned sexism; there are two sexes, after all…) it is as if the good girl (the Church pre V II) had been substituted by a slut (the Church post V II), and Ratzinger had come to tell us that it is much better if the slut dresses modestly and adopts some ways of speaking, acting, talking, moving, and thinking from the good girl. Give me the good girl back, then, thank you very much. You are not going to fool me by asking the slut to wear the plisse’ rock and the ponytail.

V II has, as often stated in this blog, a construction defect. It is wrong in the very way it was conceived, in the very mentality it represented, and in the very attitude it spread the world over. The Council is Church Sluttishness in the most authentic sense of the word. The “treason of the true Council” is a legend, and a very naive one at that: the “Council Fathers” went back to their dioceses and accompanied the demolition of so much sound Catholicism every step of the way. Do not try to persuade me this is not what was wanted all along. Once again, this is like a premarital pregnancy: it did not “just happen”. 

Summa summarum: V II is a slut. It is a slut in the way it walks, in the way it talks and, obviously, in the way it lives. Ratzinger tried to cloth sluttishness with modesty, and everyone praised how nice and chaste the ponytail looked; but look: a ponytail isn’t changing the mentality that is still there; and boy, how the mentality was still there! 

The author of the blog also makes another very important consideration which, translated, means: as long as the slut is around, problems won’t be far. Or: even if we were to get a Benedict XVII after Pope Dope, the next nutcase is just a matter of time. Why? Because, to remain by the figure of speech, behaving badly is what sluts do. 

When we say ( and everyone says) that Francis is “V II on steroids” we mean just this: that the disease was already there; with Francis, it has merely degenerated to a serious fever. 

Who has ordained Bergoglio? JP II. “Faggot” Forte? JP II, (apparently, then Cardinal Ratzinger celebrated the Mass!).

Schoenborn? Kasper? Maradiaga? Tagle? 

It’s always one of the two: either JP II or Ratzinger. The latter failed in his appointments of bishops and cardinals so parlously, that it is because of him that we are now where we are.

There is nothing good in V II, or Communism. Merely degrees of bad. What is good and sound in Communism, or in Church practice (or in the clothes and demeanour of the slut) can always be found in the original, much better form elsewhere. The Traditional Latin Mass is better than every form of Novus Ordo no matter how reverent; the sound principles of Catholic teaching will always work much better when the novelties of V II are expunged from it; pastoral work will always be more effective when sin and its punishment are mentioned, and so on. 

There is nothing good in V II. Nothing to be saved. No improvement whatsoever. V II must be destroyed like it’s Carthago in 146 BC.

The “Hermenutic of burning to the ground and spreading salt over the ruins” is the only one that will solve the problem once and for all.

Don’t try to impress me with a plisse’ rock and a ponytail.

I know what is behind. 

Mundabor