Today is the 60th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council—and one can be excused perhaps for feeling a little exhausted by the entire topic.
After all, it was a council that, by its own admission, was mostly pastoral in nature, and therefore it is thoroughly legitimate to ask if the pastoral concerns of the early Sixties are still relevant to our world today. Indeed, when one goes on social media and writes anything in defense of the Council, younger folks routinely dismiss it with comments like, “Okay, boomer. Enjoy your hippie-era council. The rest of us have moved on.”
One can hardly blame young people for having such views. More often than not, the pastors and Catholic educators they have encountered who are the most enthusiastic promoters of the Council are also the biggest purveyors of the kind of “beige” halfway-house Catholicism that seems so insipid and pointless to them.
Vatican II thus comes to represent to them a Catholicism in retreat and in full embarrassment mode over the fact that the Church still exists as anything more than liberalism at prayer.
Going deeper, beyond exhaustion and clichés
Such views are understandable. But they are also wrong. Exhaustion over a topic must never be confused with the importance of the topic. Indeed, the more important the topic, the more likely it is that it is going to be beaten to death in a thousand different ways, which can then lead to an exhausted cognitive collapse and subsequent resentment at the topic’s very existence and persistence.
When this state of conceptual and cultural exhaustion is reached, the relative “peace” of the status quo, with its modus vivendi between warring parties having been in place for a long while, always seems preferable. And so, a quiet mediocrity of compromised frustration takes root, with nobody quite satisfied with the results, but all in agreement that “extremes” need to be avoided. However, what now counts as “extreme” is daring to insist that the topics in play are still of vital importance and that the pablum of a “no man’s land” form of the Faith, where nothing of any real substance is ever debated, is not sustainable in the long run.
I think this is the situation we find ourselves in today. A certain version of the Council, largely defined and put into place in the 70s and 80s, quickly became the standardized status quo of a Catholicism made safe for the culture of the suburban cul-de-sac. We even built our new “churches in the round” to look like the cul-de-sac. Built, in theory, to facilitate kinetic “fellowship”, these new churches became the architectural expression of a runaway horizontalism that was constantly chasing its own tail and leading nowhere of any particular interest to anyone. “Hooray! We can now see the priest at Mass as he faces us!” Except, as it turns out, nobody really much cared about that.
My claim is that this state of exhaustion over the Council, and the boredom created by its flawed implementation as a vast project of accommodation to modern secular culture, actually presents us with a unique opportunity to step back and look at it with fresh eyes. The immediate post-conciliar project is over, and the status quo “peace” it created is a Laodicean failure. But this failure, rather than leading us to reject the Council, should instead act as a motivation to go back and retrieve the truly radical Catholic project it represented and attempted to enact.
And by “radical” I mean that in the most orthodox sense of going back to the “roots” of the faith to set a Christological fire.
Despite exhaustion, now is the time to ask the deeper question of just what the specific pastoral concerns of the Council were. It is easy to dismiss those concerns as the now irrelevant enthusiasms of “boomers”. But this is not true when one examines the Council in real detail and not in memes and clichés. And following upon that question, the related question of whether the cultural realities the council sought to address are still with us in some form today. And finally, the question of obedience to the magisterium, as the magisterium still seems to think, as it has for 60 years now, that the Council still matters greatly.
It is critical that we do this because, with all due respect to my traditionalist friends, the Council was called for a reason. And that reason had everything to do with the clear indications that there were grave problems with the pre-conciliar Church. Furthermore, those problems were fatal flaws when it came to the Church meeting the cultural challenge of modernity in its full de facto atheist mode. Already in 1958, a young Father Joseph Ratzinger penned a bombshell article entitled, “The New Paganism in the Church”. Note well his unvarnished, raw, and scathing comments:
According to religion statistics, old Europe is still an almost completely Christian part of the Earth. But there can be no better case than this to prove what everyone knows, that statistics lie. The appearance of the church in the modern era shows that in a completely new way it has become a church of pagans, and increasingly so: no longer, as it once was, a church made up of pagans who have become Christians, but a church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but have really become pagans. Paganism is entrenched today in the church itself. That is the mark both of the church of our time and also of the new paganism. This paganism is actually in the church and a church in whose heart paganism lives. (Hochland, October 1958. Quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life. Volume I, 296)
The greatest challenge the Church had ever encountered
Therefore, to the question of what the main pastoral concerns of the Council were, we can state that the primary concern was a lukewarm Church living off the last gasp of a dying Christendom. The Church was locked into a fortress mentality, but with little awareness that those inside the fortress had long ago lost interest in the defensive project and had even begun to sympathize with and envy those on the outside.
Theologians such as Ratzinger and his allies, and bishops including a young Karol Wojtyla, understood this fact. And they further understood that the grave pastoral crisis of the time was a crisis of unbelief, of a de facto atheism and increasingly aggressive secularism in the culture and in the Church, and thus a crisis of the deepest and most severe proportions imaginable.
In other words, the leading lights of the Council understood that modernity represents the gravest challenge the Church had ever encountered. In all previous crises, be it the Gnostic or Arian or Protestant challenges, the Church could at least still presume that there was a shared reservoir of religious consciousness wherein all parties agreed that the questions of God, salvation, and spiritual existence still mattered as the most important things of all. But this was no longer true of modernity, which represented a movement that sought to negate the Faith at its deepest roots and to kill the entire plant and all plants like it.
The conciliar leading lights understood that modernity is Babel writ large and on steroids: the Promethean attempt to construct an entire civilization on the proposition that the question of God not only does not matter but is actually an impediment to human well-being and “progress”. They further understood that standard scholastic theology had failed to inspire and breathe fire into the Church’s doctrinal equations, and was too obsessed with “truth vanquishing error in deductive certitude” to actually steel man against the atheistic arguments of modernity in order to confront them authentically and effectively.
To be sure, there were also those at the Council who did not share this assessment of modernity as a latently atheistic project and whose vision of a broad “aggiornamento” with modern Liberal culture included a warm embrace of many modern secular values. We can see traces of this approach in the second half of Gaudium et Spes in particular. Followers of influential theologians, including Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, viewed Vatican II as a first step toward a second Reformation that would completely change the constitutive nature of basic Catholic doctrines. But such radically revisionist theologies cannot be said to have been the majority view at the council, as any objective reading of the texts will confirm (more on this topic below).
Many critics of Vatican II constantly repeat the lament that it issued no condemnations or anathemas of the errors of the day; that it issued no new canons and no new dogmas; that it was instead a word salad of theological verbiage that was too prolix for its own good. But this is to appeal to the very ecclesial model that had proven so ineffective in the first place and had led to the pastoral lassitude that so afflicted the Church. As if scholasticism and the original conciliar schemata of Cardinal Ottaviani’s Holy Office weren’t already a dense thicket of impenetrable and, quite frankly, boring distinctions that appealed to nobody outside of the shrinking camp of restorationists and hard integralists who seemed oblivious to the revolutionary cultural challenges at hand.
In reality, all of that so-called “theological verbiage” of the Council was in the service of constructing a renewed understanding of Revelation and its ecclesial mediations as a Trinitarian/Christological reality which alone could ground a renewed theological anthropology worthy of the challenges of modernity. Condemnations and anathemas would achieve nothing except a smug comfort in our own rightness. What was needed instead was a theological and metaphysical vision deep enough and broad enough to position the Church’s message as the deeper cosmology and the deeper anthropology. And, therefore, as the deeper and only truly authentic “humanism”.
In many ways, the conciliar theological project was a continuation and advancement of the Christian humanism of men like St. Francis de Sales, as well as the deep Christological cosmology and anthropology of the patristic era. The Council sought to tap into the Church’s vast intellectual resources beyond the categories of scholasticism, even as it utilized the best of scholastic/Thomistic thought to give those patristic insights greater precision.
This is a theological project still worth pursuing. In fact, it must be pursued lest the Church continue to contend with the modern world with one hand tied behind its back and with only one eye open. Furthermore, given the conciliar shift in focus to a more patristic orientation, the time is also now ripe for the Church to go back to the best of her scholastic/Thomistic heritage and to retrieve those elements as well. We see this being done in a Thomistic revival that is now in a fruitful dialogue with the inheritors of the ressourcement/Communio traditions. This effort must continue in order to bring the Council to greater fruition as a grand intellectual alternative to the exhausted dead-ends of nihilistic modernity.
A flaw exploited by the rupturists
This is not to say that the Council did not have flaws. Of course it did, as all councils have had flaws of varying degrees of magnitude. In my view, the chief flaw of Vatican II was that in so emphasizing its continuity with past teachings, it tended to gloss over that it was developing doctrine in key areas and that all of its formulations were in a tight organic continuity with the past. Msgr. Thomas Guarino, in his excellent book, The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II, refers to this conciliar glossing over of development as a “masking”. He emphasizes that this was not an effort at deception in the slightest. It was instead a sincere attempt to take account of the objections of the traditionalists at the Council—objections which St. Pope Paul VI repeatedly insisted had to be taken seriously.
In other words, the Council did provide us with a hermeneutic for its own interpretation, and that was a hermeneutic of continuity. But it did not give us a well-articulated theology of the development of doctrine with clear criteria in place. And that deficit left the door open for later misinterpretations of just what these developments meant. To wit, were they the deepening of ideas already in the tradition (the proper view), or were they dog whistle code for a new “open season” on revisiting every Catholic doctrine in the light of modern canons of rationality?
Specifically, the smooth narrative of continuity had some minor cracks that were exploited by later progressives to portray the Council as a “rupturist” enterprise that needed to be taken further, in almost all areas of theology. What the council lacked in this regard was an explicit document providing clear hermeneutical principles for how it itself was developing doctrine in some key areas (e.g., religious freedom, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue) and that these developments were to be properly interpreted from within the tradition and not based on any extra-ecclesial ideologies.
Hindsight is 20/20, and the Council fathers, in one sense, could hardly be faulted for just presuming that its texts would be interpreted faithfully from within the theological categories of the entire tradition. Especially since the actual texts go out of their way to position the conciliar teachings firmly within the tradition! What more, they might now ask us, could they have done? Were they wrong, or at least naïve, to presume upon the goodwill of later misinterpreters? The famous “ambiguities” of the Council should not be exaggerated since the clear intent of the Council fathers comes nowhere near the rupturist fantasies of later saboteurs, a fact constantly repeated by both St. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
The strategy of the saboteurs was to try and portray Vatican II as more of a “rupturist event” rather than a set of normative texts embedded within the tradition, thus enabling them to ignore the actual words of the Council in favor of a culturally conditioned “spirit of Vatican II”. This is by now a cliché observation, but one that bears repeating. The Council was manipulated, distorted, and betrayed by a well-organized group of theologians in league with certain influential prelates. And any objective reading of the actual conciliar texts is all the evidence one needs to substantiate this claim of betrayal. It was, in fact, a kind of ecclesial coup d’état, the effects of which are still with us.
After the Council, there also emerged, in alliance with the rupturists, a new theory of the relationship between the theological guild and the Church. It deemphasized the ecclesial context for properly doing Catholic theology, and asserted that there is not a single “magisterium” of the Church centered on the hierarchy, but that there are multiple “magisteria” in the Church, with the theological guild constituting an independent magisterium all its own.
This clever act of theological legerdemain allowed entire theology departments at major Catholic universities to declare their “scientific independence” from the magisterium of the bishops and the pope. And the revisionism was so widespread and deep that there was little the Church could do to stop it short of draconian disciplinary measures that most likely would have failed anyway to stop the bleeding. It would have been tantamount to putting a Band-Aid over an aortic aneurysm.
This was the monumental betrayal and ecclesial catastrophe that confronted the newly elected Pope John Paul II. Which is why one of the primary projects of his long papacy was to bypass the entire mess by developing a large body of magisterial teaching on the proper hermeneutic of the Council and its true theology. The young traditionalists of today, many of whom are increasingly critical of John Paul, fail to grasp the nettle of the problem he faced and its monumental challenge to the Church, and therefore fail to grasp his true greatness within the context of the crisis he faced.
The success of Vatican II
The remaining question about Vatican II is a simple one. In light of the clear betrayal of the Council, is it now so mortally wounded and compromised that it cannot be revived? That seems to be the attitude of many of the self-described traditionalists. The thinking seems to be that, despite much of the profound theology in the conciliar texts, there is simply no way to revive the patient. It has bled out. Likewise, despite the greatness of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, their papacies were tied at the hip to the Council, and so they also have been eclipsed by events. It is now better, they say, to just ignore it all and to go back to the preconciliar theology and form of the Church in a kind of great reset.
I respectfully disagree. There are examples of failed councils, and perhaps Vatican II is one of them. But it is also true that councils of great consequence often take a very long time to be received properly. Just ask St. Athanasius what he thought of the post-Nicene conciliar scene.
Furthermore, the traditionalist claim that the aftermath of the Council proves it was a failure needs to be challenged a bit. It is indeed true, viewed as a massive attempt at a glorious pastoral reinvigoration of the Church, that the Council clearly did not lead to such an outcome.
But what if we lower the bar and use a retrospective appraisal to view the Council more accurately for what it really turned out to be, which was an attempt at pastoral renewal via the path of theological renewal. What if we can now see with greater clarity that the primary strength of Vatican II was that it was a council of theologians, by theologians and for theologians? That it was a “theologian’s council” seeking to position the Church intellectually to confront the ideological challenges of modernity?
Viewed in this more limited light, it can be credibly stated that the Council was actually a success. Even taking account of the vast amount of bad theology that entered the Church after the Council, the fact remains that there has been an explosion of truly profound theological scholarship over the past sixty years that is nothing short of astounding. And that scholarship has greatly enhanced the intellectual ability of the Church to meet the challenges of today. There is a resurgence of deep Thomistic scholarship currently ongoing, as well as Communio/ressourcement theologies, but also in whole new approaches to theology that are thoroughly orthodox but which utilize insights from phenomenology, psychology, sociology, and a host of other disciplines.
Therefore, viewed as a council that sought theological retrieval and renewal, Vatican II was a success. And so, ironically, perhaps it is time to move on from the Council. But not because it was a failure, but because it was a success insofar as it accomplished a theological renewal that is now moving forward on its own steam.
Finally, perhaps now, in light of this theological renewal, even the loftier pastoral aim of a new springtime in the Church can be achieved. The superficial accommodationist theologies of the immediate post-conciliar era are happily giving way to serious theologies grounded in the Paschal Mystery and the Trinitarian God of love made known therein. Perhaps now, finally, we can see a reinvigoration of the laity and the universal call to holiness. Perhaps now, finally, we can seek sanctification grounded in a deep Christocentric vision filled with evangelical zeal.
And perhaps we can now stop arguing about Marian titles and worry more about emulating Mary’s prayer to “cast down the mighty from their thrones and to lift up the lowly.” In other words, to put on Marian subjectivity so we can live, radically, the wild ride that is Christological objectivity, and its clarion call to “come up higher”.
I think it is too early to write the obituary of Vatican II. And a simplistic return to the structure and theology of post-Tridentine Baroque Catholicism would be a pastoral mistake of the highest order. Therefore, must move forward and redouble our efforts at retrieving the real Council—no matter how exhausted we might all be with that project. Giving in to exhaustion when fortitude is called for instead is an act of cowardice, while retreating into the putative safety of a fortress with gossamer walls is a fool’s errand.
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“must move forward and redouble our efforts at retrieving the real Council”.
You joking?
The real council was interpreted by the real magisterium; Post-Conciliarism IS Vatican II.
The real council is the official Vatican post-conciliar documents applying global meltdown of the Catholic Church.
What more is there to discover?
60 years on, sodomic couples can have their active relationship blessed, while the last of the Catholics are persecuted from underground China to downtown Chicago.
The only way forward for the Catholic Church is back to Sacred Tradition.
Unfortunately, he is not. This is the same dreary nonsense about “retrieving the real Council” that we have been force-feed for 60 years, now amplified by Chapp into his turgidly mawkish fantasy that “[t]he superficial accommodationist theologies of the immediate post-conciliar era are happily giving way to serious theologies grounded in the Paschal Mystery and the Trinitarian God of love made known therein”.
For those who call for a real book on this subject, I suggest this forthcoming one:https://bigmodernism.substack.com/p/upcoming-book-vatican-ii-the-anatomy
Looks like a great book Paul.
Lets hope CWR gets an advance copy and reviews it: sounds like a more digestable version of Iota Unam by R.Amerio?!
😉
Thanks, Paul. It sounds like the book will be spot on as unfortunately, the only thing Vatican II seemed to accomplish was to compromise The Deposit of Faith out of a desire to accommodate modernity.
Sadly, a forward moving mindset (like that exemplified by the S.O.S.) will never actually “fix” the council and its aftermath in a manner consistent with the support the pre-V2 Catholic Church enjoyed . . . (here in the United States) try a 78%-85% average weekly mass attendance of all Catholics in 1958 for one, or the far greater number of consecrated religious for two, or, for three, the far greater number of seminarians, and four, just correctly assume I can go on for an appreciable length covering relevant topics like obvious flaws in theology, e.g. “mercy, mercy, mercy”, compromises on doctrine, e.g. “blessing” homosexual couples, disconnects in lex credendi vis-a-vis lex orandi, e.g. “Hey, that’s God in the Holy Tabernacle. I know, let’s turn our backs on Him” and let’s never forget that lex vivendi – the lay “Catholic life” has been completely decimated. You can hardly find examples of lay Catholic Life with the obvious exception of St. Mary’s Kansas (Thank God for the SSPX). That alone, and the fact that causal connections have now been unmistakably made to accurately cast blame on “the council” for the demise, the decomposition, the “irrelevance” of the current church (https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/data-researchers-conclude-vatican-ii-triggered-decline-in-catholic-practice/).
No. I’d say any reference to “the council” now has such horrible connotations and implications, the quicker we abandon it, rebuke and anathematize it; the better. The only remedy for a dumpster fire like that infernal council, Vatican II, would be to RETURN to Catholicism in full measure. Drop ecumenism, i.e. “Ecclesial Communism”, drop collegiality, i.e. the appearance of a quasi-democratic political process and drop “Religious Liberty” – whatever that is – have you read Fr. Heenan’s commentary on the council as regards the topic of “Religious Liberty”? It’s astounding. None of the Bps. in attendance had the faintest idea what the notion even meant: at least 3 very different meanings were advanced and discussed; but, in fact, hardly resolved. To this day, we’re still scratching our heads; but “Co-redemptrix” or “Mediatrix of all graces” is confusing, eh? Sure.
The final straw that will break the modernist iteration of what some people still think is the Catholic Church will be that penultimate waste-of-time: the Sin-nod on Sin-nodality. Tautology anyone? I am deeply concerned for the salvation of those souls that tie themselves to that temporal “floater”. As Cdl. McElroy stated (and the document on the implementation of the SOS clearly states) the SOS will bring into sharper focus the mission and objectives began at Vatican II. No thanks. Covid woke a lot of sleeping Catholics who discovered that Fr. Bob at the N.O. wasn’t so sure about his faith when the virus made the rounds. The only group of Catholics offering the Mass, hearing confessions, wedding couples, baptizing and offering Last Rites were all those priests the late pope excoriated for “wearing lace”. Which makes me wonder how Frances might be enjoying Heaven, given the fact that it is exclusively the LATIN MASS that is offered. 😉
Chapp is putatively right as I read him. Aside from a strenuous effort to retrieve the real intent of Vat II, a necessary Council to revive a Church dying within due to dying faith, the betrayal ethic of clerics wishing to remove the responsibility of wearing their white strip of identity was and is real – the booster of the best of our classical Thomist tradition – this effort will not succeed unless we have leadership the the authority to transform what has occurred including the counterfeit ecclesiology called Synodality.
At present Leo XIV is the key entity. His impromptu [for onlookers] January cardinals consistory leaves much to the imagination, to say the least for many of us who hope for a clear, consistent Apostolically viable change of direction. That he has avowed loyalty to the momentum of Francis I into the darkness of relativity will require an act of God. That can be had by our own willingness to pay the price of radical sanctification.
Fr. Morello,
Here’s a question soon to be answered:
When the dozen or so post-synod “expert” Study Groups on “hot-button issues” report their wares this very month of December…and the consistory of cardinals is convened in January…is Leo XIV actually sidestepping the dicasteries of the Vatican swamp, or not?
That the agenda for female deaconesses has already been removed from the mix might be cause for guarded confidence.
Thanks for the helpful sign Dr Beaulieu [you actually deserve the title of doctor].
An interesting article. Let me begin with a statement of yours with which I agree.”Vatican II was that it was a council of theologians, by theologians and for theologians?” You mention that as a strength, but I do not see it as such. If you asked 100 regular Sunday Mass going Catholics what Vatican II was about, at least 99 would respond that it changed the Mass to English ( which isn’t even exactly correct).
The Vatican II bishops ages being mostly in the mid 60’s they would have lived through everything from WW I to the beginning of Vietnam and the sexual revolution. They said they were reading the signs of the times, but subsequent events don’t seem to bear that out.
The excuse that all councils have taken time to take hold does not account for the fact of the speed of communication that we have now.
Vatican II was supposed to complete Vatican I’s defining of Papal authority by describing the Bishops authority – that they were not Vatican branch managers. But, in the pst decade we discovered that if the pope wished to treat them as branch managers (even to the point of saying what could be in parish bulletins) he could do so.
What MEASURABLE improvements have we had since Vatican II? Mass attendance is down, confessions are down, baptisms are down, fewer Catholic schools and students are down – and on and on.
I think that these are the facts, not pessimism.
It may be working for the theologians, but not for the laity.
Well, which councils have NOT been by theologians or for theologians? Have you read the documents of the other councils? They’re not exactly page turners.
Most of them are at least short enough for a person with a day job to have a chance, within his lifetime.
The works of St. John Paul II and Benedict XIV are indeed profound and wonderful expositions of the faith and much needed clarifications of what the Council really meant. Nevertheless, for all their profundity, they can remain nothing more than paper. Without putting in place real, living, authoritative human beings, who will honestly implement the Council, it will remain unexplained, misunderstood, and forgotten. We need people,not paper.
And that reason had everything to do with the clear indications that there were grave problems with the pre-conciliar Church.
Yes, all those full seminaries, well-attended Masses, active sodalities, and thriving hospitals and civic institutions were clear indications of grave problems.
Name one objective measure of Catholic health that has trended positively since the close of the council.
Seminaries were full back then, but they were full of cossetted mama’s boys who were attracted to the priesthood more for the social prestige, easy living, or the fact that they couldn’t find a wife than due to any actual vocation. Look how many of them eagerly left the priesthood when the social revolution of the 60s roled around.
Or they were closted homosexuals who, again, joined for the social prestige, or for more nefarious purposes. Theodore McCarrick was a product of the 1940s and 1950s seminary system, and he’s far from the only abuser ordained from that era.
Well-attended Masses full of people who went because that was the social expectation, not necessarily because they believed, or even had any sort of relationship with God. Look how many stopped going to Church when the social revolution had it.
If the Church was a strong as the romantics claim, it would not have been so easily battered when the flood of the 1960s happened. The only way to fight a disease is to diagnose it, get it out in the open, and treat it. You don’t avoid taking medicine just because it’s painful. It’s better these problems are out in the open rather than hidden away behind a smiling facade.
It’s better these problems are out in the open rather than hidden away behind a smiling facade.
Well, are you saying that the Council was “medicine” in the respect of the abuse crisis? Because a lot of it was permitted to infect the rest of the body in the 70s until the early 2000s. Yes McCarrick was a product of the 40s and 50s seminaries but he was allowed to reach the pinnacle of his influence and power after the Council.
There are hints about the private lives of precounciliar clerics like Cardinal Spellman suggest that those sort were able to reach pinnacles of influence before the council as well.
I would posit that without the council, you have an incredibly passive laity who continue to accept whatever the bishops and diocesan spin doctors continue to sell them. Thee’s no way laymen like Phil Lawler and Leon Poddles would’ve been able to call out the clergy in the 1950s without being silenced.
You can’t treat a disease if you don’t know what it is; predator priests were able to opperate far more easily in the preconciliar era than they are now, where even if the bishops are deaf to our please, they at the very least can’t escape them.
“You can’t treat a disease if you don’t know what it is; predator priests were able to opperate far more easily in the preconciliar era than they are now, where even if the bishops are deaf to our please, they at the very least can’t escape them.”
We must say, that is not at all due to Vatican II. It is due to changes in the things like secular media, which is shown by the fact, that change was not in postconcilliar timespan, but after 2000s. Saying, like your words implies, that is in some way achievement of Vatican II seems to be grounded on nothing.
I would posit that without the council, you have an incredibly passive laity who continue to accept whatever the bishops and diocesan spin doctors continue to sell them. Thee’s no way laymen like Phil Lawler and Leon Poddles would’ve been able to call out the clergy in the 1950s without being silenced.
Again, for a long time post Vatican II you had serious complacency on this. It took JPII passing away for both McCarrick and Maciel to be decisively dealt with, (with the former being apparently rehabilitated under Pope Francis) not to mention the Rupnik affair. There might be more lay noise about these issues today but I still don’t see discipline being handed down.
Priests were considered to be above other humans in pre 1960s – once it came out that they were mere human beings that was a revelation.
These are parts of articles written about a wayward priest:
On April 16, 1960 a 25-year-old schoolteacher and former beauty queen named Irene Garza attended confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen. Five days later, she was found dead in a nearby canal. An investigation revealed she’d been sexually assaulted, beaten, and suffocated.
No one’s ever been convicted of murdering Garza. The crime has loomed over the Rio Grande Valley for nearly sixty years. But now, the priest who heard her final confession has been charged with her murder. John Feit, who’s since left the priesthood, will stand trial this week in a case that’s attracted national attention.
At the time it was unthinkable for a priest to commit such a horrible act.
Garza’s cousin Lynda De La Vina, who was nine years old at the time, told CNN: ‘We were accusing a priest that – in those days priests were infallible.’
Noemi Sigler, was only 10, added: ‘It was impossible for a priest to do such a deed. I mean, if you thought of it, that would be sacrilegious.’
She also believed that authorities and the church were protecting Feit
Garza’s family has never given up on justice. Relative Noemi Sigler had been especially vigilant over the decades, digging up clues and eventually enlisting the help of the Texas Rangers. Of her efforts, she says, “Nancy Drew has nothing on me.”
Sigler wept when she learned that Feit had been arrested for murder. Decades ago, the thought that a priest could have been responsible for such a vicious act “was so horrendous that the family just did not speak about it,” she says. “To talk about a priest was a big no-no in the 1960s.”
“…the private lives of precounciliar clerics like Cardinal Spellman suggest that those sort were able to reach pinnacles of influence before the council…”
Yes, but. Many other clerics, unlike Cardinal Spellman, reached pinnacles of influence. Many other clerics, e.g., Bishop Sheen, reached pinnacles of influence and influenced many for good. This evidence nullifies your example.
David,
The heart of the sanctuary was ripped out, the altar rails thrown away, and everything cherished about Sunday’s sung latin mass vetoed by official magisterium. The decrees just never seemed to stop… The message was clear from Rome: Catholicism as you Knew it is OVER and OUT.
Of course they fled in their droves. 500.000 Germans formally exit the Catholic Church annually. The fruits of Vatican II just havent stopped flowering.
Have you experienced the Church of your childhood’s sanctuary being destroyed?
Nothing but a blank wall where once the holy of holies sanctified your Sunday ? I can assure you it leaves an anger that cannot be quelled.
Still very angry after all these years,
Mr CN
Germans leaving the Church are more likely to be caused by the Church tax, which long predated Vatican II, than by anything the Council did.
Sue,
The uptick in the exodus from the German Catholic Church dates rather from the degeneration (or progress) of Synodal Way: the latest fruit from Vatican II’s Post-Conciliar meltdown.
This is a list of unsubstantiated assertions. Do you have some evidence to support them?
“Masses full of people who went because that was the social expectation”
Yes, but. Responding to an objectively good social expectation is sometimes the best we can do. Is it good that people stay in pajamas and bed on a Sunday while screen shots fill their heads? OTOH, is there nothing to be said for people who get up, get dressed, and attend liturgy despite a lack of belief? At liturgy, people hear the Gospel and expose themselves to the Presence.
Even my non-Christian relative loves Adoration. He doesn’t know or believe the source or reason for his peace and happiness while there and in the memory he has of being there. He doesn’t know who or what IS, but he has been given peace, rest, and happiness.
The Christian/Catholic duty is to hand on tradition and faith we receive Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. God forgives the days we’ve gone to Mass with doubt or failed fervor. Discipline and obedience are needed at those times. Just go. Show up.
God rested after His grand creation and told us to rest, to keep the Sabbath, to keep it holy. He knows best what is best for us. That’s the ONLY social expectation we should follow until the Great Story ends.
Any day, I would take a church where, on average, 78%-85% of all registered Catholics were weekly attending Mass over what is, unmistakably, the current one awash with complete and utter non-sense, irrelevance and basically, collapse. On average, most dioceses today report a 9%-17% weekly mass attendance of registered Catholics. At this point, they’re simply selling off (mostly) the glorious structures of the past to pay for abuse claims. Rather, what they should do is sell off those goofy modern monstrosities built in the 60’s and 70’s and revitalize those beautiful structures that inspire awe! Unfortunately, you have 2 problems: 1. no one wants to buy those ugly structures of the 60’s and 70’s and, 2. the novus ordo mass is completely incompatible with those beautiful cruciform cathedrals designed to offer God’s Mass: the Latin Mass. So, expect things to continue to slide into the latrine until the Boomer generation are no longer sitting in the pews, which, by the looks of it, and with so few now attending, it won’t be long. The younger generations have largely rejected the “modernist” tripe and banality of the novus order and expect reverent and respectful worship . . . thank God.
I have NO PROBLEM at all with Vatican Council II. My problem is that Church progressives (usually of the homosexual persuasion) used it as the pretext to INVENT new theologies and new liturgies that betrayed the Magisterium and Tradition of the Catholic Church.
Fix the problem of heterodox progressives and you’ve fixed any problem with the Church’s receptivity to the Council. Now, wasn’t that easy?
Yep. The weariness of the Council does not stem from it being discussed so much, but from those discussions leading people nowhere, because none of the heterodox interpretations of the Council are ever clearly condemned, and none of the developments of doctrine that were so subtly woven into the documents are ever clearly described. The Council does not interpret itself, and the interpreters do not seem capable of coming to the same conclusions.
I believe Cardinal Fernandez complained about a phrase being useless if no one understands what it means without an explanation. The same could be said, far more heartily, about the book-length documents of a 60-year-old Ecumenical Council that people still do not understand.
Amen, Amanda. Your sense shines through so much blather.
This is why retaining the Latin, the Sacral Language of the church, was a lot more important – a lot more relevant – than most people suspected. If you “update” the church by ridding it of the Latin, you introduce the possibility of crafting new doctrines – those cut from the cloth of “modernity”. The only real solution to the current crisis in the church is to return to the Catholicism of PRE-Vatican II. Nothing else is required. Nothing else will work to end the crisis.
Yes to resilient theology, but Benedict also remarks (in his cited interview with Seewald) that at the Council he and others had underestimated the new problem of mature theological reflection within the new environment of media exposure and manipulation (the Küng betrayal and the rupture separating the “real Council of the Documents” from the “virtual” Spirit of Vatican II—Benedict’s terms).
A stable trajectory will be more evident when Fr. James Martin SJ and his “cloud of witlessness” are removed from photo-ops and their advisory status to the Vatican’s dicastery (or whatever) of Communication. This penetrating infection is the heart (or whatever) of the “aortic embolism” so eloquently flagged by Dr. Chapp.
We need your insights, Dr. Chapp! Maybe you’ve done this already, but a book spelling out your insights in this column would be helpful. There are so many worthwhile conclusions/observations that need specificity. For instance, aside from the gossipy tidbits that I would find fascinating, how was the post-conciliar betrayal accomplished? What were the components of that betrayal? You reference Ratzinger’s characterization of the Church as “infested” with paganism. What did that look like? Etc. There are so many et cetera’s I want to know more about. Having done theology and seminary in the late 70’s, I am often struck by how poorly I was educated, how the lack of Catholic confidence shot through everything, and how a delirium of rupture shaped just about every facet of theology. Frankly, as an active priest, I am damaged goods trying to find a way to understand it all and find a way to hide/mitigate the damage … all the while trying to steer others by my preaching to a better, more fruitful Catholicism. My peers are for the most part uninterested in my “project,” even hostile. And the younger guys just don’t understand … and are skeptical, cynical – again, even hostile – about anything my generation has to offer.
For one “specificity” search “Weigel Truce of 1968.”
Dr. Chapp has authored the most insightful assessment of the dysfunction surrounding the reception of the second Vatican Council that I’ve seen.
He is characterizing the pre-Vatican II Church accurately. It was not the spotless refuge of phalanxes of saints that council detractors would have us believe. There were issues that needed to be addressed.
Above all, perhaps, he correctly states that the council fathers took great pains to ensure that their contributions were completely aligned with Church tradition. Indeed, continuity was an ongoing theme throughout the proceedings.
The widely castigated “catholique” abuses that were attributed to the council were instituted by progressives — I’m talking about insipid music, stalactite statuary, feelgood homilies and all the rest — were not envisioned or supported by Vatican II.
God bless Dr. Chapp for taking another look at this much-abused chapter in recent Church history.
When the Belgian Bishops conference dissented from Humanae Vitae, their statement was drafted by Msgr. Gerard Phillips, the architect of Lumen Gentium.
The “well-organized group of theologians” were on the Conciliar commissions drafting the documents and the “certain influential prelates” they were in league with were the Council Presidents and Moderators who steered the Council away from John XXIII’s schemata and plan for only a single session Council. With Pope Francis legitimizing their interpretation, the liberals now have every claim to an authentic understanding as anyone else. They themselves do not claim rupture, but “the beginning of a new beginning,” with the same continuity with tradition that Dr. Chapp asserts here. They also produce better research on the Council’s history and philosophy.
Conservatives can no longer maintain a Hermeneutic of Betrayal to dismiss Traditionalist reservations.
The ressourcement/Communio tradition was just as much a rupture with the Church of all time as the that of Kung and co.; High Church modernist tendencies versus Low Church modernist tendencies. The Tridentine renaissance of scholasticism worked very well. The problem for the pre-Vatican II Church was having to exist in civil societies that were dominated by the theories of the Enlightenment, and this especially includes ancien regime monarchies, which spent the century before the French revolution trying to impose Enlightenment notions on the Church. Once the Church began to deliberately absorb Enlightenment tendencies, after Vatican II, we had the beginning of the present crisis. Recovery is premised, among other things, on taking up scholasticism seriously again. It wins all intellectual debates hand down. It’s important to remember that the Enlightenment only subordinated the scholastic worldview through military and political violence in the seventeenth century.
“It (Scholasticism) wins all intellectual debates hand down.” No, it doesn’t. Early modern scholasticism was itself hijacked by modernity (for evidence see the deontological emphasis in ethics held by both Kant and Ligouri, the latter of whom never once uses the word “beatitudo” in his index of Moral Theology.) At best, it appealed only to the transcendental of the truth, and a particular kind of analytic mind (I might use Iain McGilchrist’s designation of “left-brained” to describe them) that itself is not the reason or the consciousness of the ordinary relatively healthy person, and certainly does appeal to the hearts of a wounded person. Unless you touch the hearts of the person wounded by sin, a well-placed syllogism does no good (See St. Paul on “If I have all knowledge” Or Newman
No man was ever willing to die for syllogism”) We need a theology that not merely makes us feel good about our intellectual rightness, we need a theology that
is grounded in all the transcendental properties of God (goodness and beauty as well as truth) that shoots for the heart as well as the head, and in doing so converts, and I’m sorry, the scholasticism you subscribe to does not do that.
Your comment proves how scholasticism wins all arguments hands down. Given an opportunity to show where it was wrong, i.e. irrational, you merely discussed left-brain activity. Indeed, the only way scholasticism was defeated was by “moving on” and ignoring it, or by distorting it (the “Communio” modernists).
“We need a theology that not merely makes us feel good about our intellectual rightness, we need a theology that is grounded in all the transcendental properties of God (goodness and beauty as well as truth) that shoots for the heart as well as the head, and in doing so converts, and I’m sorry, the scholasticism you subscribe to does not do that.”
Theology is supposed to describe the reality of God, and the reality of God cannot be evolutionary nor could it have been inaccessible to those of the past. If you do not know that scholasticism postulates beauty and goodness as well as truth as a priori presuppositions, then you have never read Aquinas nor anyone who values his holiness.
Re jpfhays above (1:59 p.m.) – “. . . how was the post-council betrayal accomplished?”
Betrayal of the Council and betrayal of the laity.
Dr. Chapp’s argument hangs on the assertion that modernity posed a unique threat. But what if modernity was just unbelief, and the old theology failed to persuade because its content was rejected? Changing the words of the old theology would not change the unbelief, but it would unmoor those who still believed.
Thinking that words make reality is an old temptation for academics.
St. Pius X declared modernism to be the synthesis of all heresies well before the Council. There were definitely problems with the pre-Conciliar Church (there always are: we’re the Church Militant, not the Church Chilling), and I believe traditionalists like Fr. Ripperger and Dr. Kwaskiewski readily admit that. Those problems just got worse after the Council and the liturgical upheaval, and seemed to have found the Council documents fairly easy to co-opt – as documents that stand on both sides of the issues (or seem to) generally are.
Indeed, and subtlety and ambiguity are also temptations for academics. Ambiguity feels safer, as it is harder to attack someone for saying things when you have no idea what they said, and subtlety is just plain fun sometimes.
As a convert, I tend to think freely about these topics and still question the status quo without guilt. Can anyone share something positive that came from Vatican II? To me, it seems grim—it almost decapitated the Church. People left, pews were empty, priests walked away, and the remaining monks and nuns were busy learning guitar and singing simple songs about love and peace. What was so wrong that Vatican II had to happen? It feels more like fear of the future than standing on the Rock of Tradition, trusting that what has always been, which is the veritable Body of Christ, radiant in truth that still calls the wayward back to Him.
Orientalium ecclesiarium, I believe was positive. The Eastern Catholic minorities had had to put up with a lot of pressure to conform to the Latin culture, to the point that many Eastern Catholic Churches in America became Orthodox, because they could not get priests, because the married clergy they allowed were not permitted in predominantly Latin Church regions.
The document is also interesting to read from the traditionalist Latin Catholic point of view, as it shows the Church’s keen interest in protecting both Tradition and traditions.
I have also heard, though I haven’t pieced together any references from the documents, that it was intended to re-confirm the authority of bishops, as successors of the Apostles and not merely middle managers and extensions of the Pope. Vatican 1 established the Pope’s authority, and the subsequent pendulum swing might have gone a bit far. Vatican 2 might have resulted in the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, without really correcting the first swing: we now have had Curial officials regulating parish bulletins, but very little in the way of corrections of heresy. One of the Pope’s jobs is to confirm the brethren in the Faith, but Jesus said nothing about bulletins… So perhaps that is something the Council tried to do, that needs to be done, but which has not really been accomplished as yet.
There are always wrong things going on in the Church that need correctives. Sometimes the things that need correctives are the results of past correctives.
One of the reasons I love the tradition of processions (Eucharistic or otherwise) is that you can get a really good feel for the combination of following after Christ, Who is radiant in truth, beauty, and goodness, with all the typical chaos of a large group of people who may or may not know what they’re doing, may or may not be able to hear the singing/praying, much less join in, with certain members who may or may not need to chase a small child or three in a completely different direction. It goes much more smoothly if everyone tries to follow Jesus and Tradition. People mess up, sometimes in big ways. The leaders also mess up, sometimes in very big ways. We step outside of God’s positive will, and act on fear instead of trust, all the time… but His promise to the Church never fails, because He cannot deny Himself.
Dr. Chapp once again goes full bluestocking length of his percipient review subject, so as to upset people like Mr. Cracked.
The details are all worth the examination whether he got them right or wrong. And it takes some doing because they might be opposed viewpoints. And also he writes thick or densely.
VATICAN II remains flashpoint today as it has been since it was called. The important thing, I think, is to grasp properly what the igniting source is at any given time and what kind of blaze gets produced. Also, some earlier conflagrations are burning still and some are receding to embers maybe until they are rekindled again -so to speak.
That VATICAN II is such a flashpoint is a very good thing. Among other issues it is showing us the fulfillment of the prophecies at Fatima. Within which I would connect the difficulties faced by BXVI, Vatileaks, being ignored, isolation, artless/crude calumny, etc. He suffered in them what we all have to undergo, avidity, charlatanism, churlishness, etc.; and not to forget one he himself named out, sycophancy.
So that you hear what I said: all of that and such and so is upon every one of us. It is not the fault of the Council. It is not peculiar to Benedict.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2012/05/26/bring-on-the-butler-jokes/
. A certain version of the Council, largely defined and put into place in the 70s and 80s, quickly became the standardized status quo of a Catholicism made safe for the culture of the suburban cul-de-sac. We even built our new “churches in the round” to look like the cul-de-sac. Built, in theory, to facilitate kinetic “fellowship”, these new churches became the architectural expression of a runaway horizontalism that was constantly chasing its own tail and leading nowhere of any particular interest to anyone. “Hooray! We can now see the priest at Mass as he faces us!” Except, as it turns out, nobody really much cared about that.
This is very well said by Dr. Chapp, I agree with it 100%. I just wish he would go further and acknowledge that it was the Communio Popes like John Paul II who to use Dr. Chapp’s phrase “implemented” things like the ugly round churches (starting in his native Krakow in the 1970s) across the Catholic world. In the 80s and 90s while money was being built for those architectural monstrosities, a lot of rad-trads were forced to have their Masses said in trailers or houses in not so nice areas of town.
Speaking as a trad, I don’t have any real desire to go back to the 1950s or to Baroque Catholicism. On the other hand though, we shouldn’t take such a gloomily view of pre-Vatican theology as Dr. Chapp does. As Dr. Minerd has shown pre-Vatican II Scholasticism was also an honest attempt to come to terms with modernity. Nobody can seriously read say De Konnick’s engagement with Marxism, Darwinism or quantum mechanics and simply see the caricature of Neo-Scholasticism as a bunch of dry, self-referential syllogisms.
In other words, the Council did provide us with a hermeneutic for its own interpretation, and that was a hermeneutic of continuity. But it did not give us a well-articulated theology of the development of doctrine with clear criteria in place.
Shouldn’t it be also noted though that many of the influential thinkers of the Communio School like Romano Guardini reacted to Neo-Scholasticism by eschewing a style of theology that was seen as too precise too “dry” as I have heard it characterized. Instead a theology was adopted more narrative in style, more drawn to history than syllogism. “Lack of precision” then was a seen as a feature and not a bug.
“The Church was locked into a fortress mentality, but with little awareness that those inside the fortress had long ago lost interest in the defensive project and had even begun to sympathize with and envy those on the outside.”
I don’t dispute this statement at all, because cultural Catholicism was everywhere, with little actual faith (and, if I am to believe my elders, even less understanding).
But the irony is that the takeaway here seems to be that the Council was a success because theologians got to do some really cool stuff after the suffocating mask of Manualism was removed. Sure, some theologicans float their wild ideas about “Christ as a failed individual” or how to define the Omega Point, and others push back and show how phenomenology is a corrective to Scholasticism — and it seems like just another myopic mentality, this time an “open-air” fortress adrift. Meanwhile, most of the laity left, and those who remain twirl in an identity crisis, downstream of the ivory tower. At least before, anyone who sincerely wanted to know what the Church taught could find a definitive answer. Now? Create your own magisterium.
You seem to present a familiar caricature of pre–Vatican II theology—precisely the inverse caricature used by certain traditionalists. Both sides universalize the weakest representatives. Yet my own formation was steeped in pre-conciliar texts—especially the Carmelite mystical tradition, Garrigou-Lagrange, and the great papal magisterium—and I have consistently found them clearer, more profound, and more spiritually substantial than much that followed. Pius XII’s Haurietis Aquas is only one example of the depth and coherence available in that tradition.
In studying the Nouvelle Théologie, particularly through Jonathan Kirwan’s recent work, I increasingly wonder whether the movement, as a generational phenomenon, reflects a kind of post–WWI spiritual and intellectual fatigue—a theological “Lost Generation.” A younger cohort emerged who sensed their elders were inadequate to the crises of modernity. This produced not a patient reform but an impulse to remake theology from the ground up. This is not to reduce the movement to psychology; its contributions were real. But it does name the posture that shaped its earliest instincts: a reaction that, in important ways, loosened theology from the metaphysical foundations necessary for true integration.
Where I agree with you is on John Paul II: he engaged personalism, yet anchored it again in a robust metaphysics.
Where I cannot follow is the suggestion that the Church’s future must be centered on Vatican II. That is simply not what is occurring on the ground. I am a seminarian. Vatican II is rarely studied in any substantive way; its principles are often assumed rather than examined. None of my brothers look to the Council as a source of inspiration. At most, some defend it in the abstract as a badge of ecclesial authenticity, while others regard it with a kind of weary cynicism.
Our philosophical formation is strong—Thomistic, metaphysically serious, often demanding, and genuinely inspiring. But when we transition into theology, the atmosphere shifts: it becomes “ho-hum,” predominantly pastoral and phenomenological. Nothing overtly heterodox, but little that is integrated. As John Paul II insists in Fides et Ratio, genuine integration rests upon the philosophy of being. A merely pastoral or phenomenological framework gestures toward this but does not actually supply it.
I agree that, pastorally, we must begin with what is first in the order of knowledge—experience. But our formation often feels pasted together because what is first absolutely—the metaphysical foundations—is treated as too intellectual, insufficiently pastoral, and therefore set aside. And this is done in the name of Vatican II.
My own approach—providential realism—is to receive what is good, purify what is unclear, and rebuild on the tradition’s durable foundations. And above all: renewal will be martyrial, not merely theological.
Thank you, James, rather fascinating. I agree about the Nouvelle Theologie. Such time-bound musings are like a letter that you write in heat of some passion, but set aside to re-read the next day. In the calm morning breeze, you realise that it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and you tuck it away without sending. It was a valid expression of the moment, nothing more. One can never belittle the horrors associated with WWI, but the angst that swept Europe simply cannot be the lens through which we understand God. Maybe better just to set the whole thing aside as a cautionary tale, or as instruction on how to survive [or not] an ongoing spiritual blitzkreig.
It sounds like the philosophy you’ve been taught is top-down, hard-won wrangling about terms and consequences; thus it holds up well. On the other hand, the theology is bottom-up, experience-based which depends almost totally on finding thinkers who share a worldview, personality traits, or whatever. Not rigourous in a way that echoes the philosophy underpinning it.
‘Providential Realism’ sounds intriguing. Any authors you recommend? I wish you well in your studies, wherever they lead you.
I’ve just coined the term. The idea is simple: history happens, and God permits it; He does not abandon the Church. The principle pushes back against the impulse to circumvent what has been handed down in order to engineer renewal. That impulse shaped de Lubac and his confrères: by defining themselves against neo-scholasticism, they could not genuinely build upon the tradition. They didn’t recover the past; they reinvented it through the lens of Maurice Blondel’s philosophy. Did the Church need to develop beyond neo-scholasticism? Yes. But once you define yourself in opposition to your own foundation, the result can only be rupture.
At the same time, this principle is a warning to traditionalists: the answer is not to circumvent the post-conciliar period in order to “restore” the Church. That would be just another reinvention of the past.
James the Seminarian,
About a “theological ‘Lost Generation’,” yours truly humbly recalls my own reflections as a non-theologian (with lots of good stuff gleaned from others) in A GENERATION ABANDONED…which ends with three chapters on today’s default theologies of Evolution-ism, Technocracy, and the Dawkins meaningless “universe.” https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/03/29/a-generation-abandoned-why-whatever-is-not-enough/
About vacuous theological novelties, the last chapter channels Whittaker Chambers, the mid-century Quaker convert from Communism, who found a very simply way to nurture his young son into a Reality deeper than digital Modernity. This, from the epilogue to his book, WITNESS (1952):
___________________
“What little I know of the stars I have passed on to my son over the years….we often stop to watch through the apple trees the great sky triangle tipped by the evening stars: Vega in Lyra, Altair in Aquila and Deneb, burning in the constellation of the Swan.
“Sometimes, I draw my son’s eye to the constellation Hercules, especially to the great nebula dimly visible about the middle of the group. Now and again, I remind him that what we can just make out as a faint haze is another universe—the radiance of fifty thousand suns whose light had left its source thirty-four thousand years before it brushes the miracle of our straining sight.
“Those are the only statistics that I shall ever trouble my son with….I want him to have a standard as simple as stepping into the dark and raising his eyes whereby to measure what he is and what he is not against the order of reality. I want him to see for himself upon the scale of the universes that God, the soul, faith, are not simple matters . . . .
“I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them, and that the problem of good and evil is not more simple than the immensity of worlds.
“I want him to understand that evil is not something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away, for it is not merely an uninvited guest, but lies coiled in foro interno [that is] at home with good within ourselves. Evil can only be fought. . . .I want him to know that it is his soul, and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns.”
Very interesting. Perhaps I will take a look at your book. I should have more directly attributed the moniker “Lost Generation” to Jon Kirwan. He does a remarkable job of demonstrating the generational formation of a cadre of French Jesuits returning from WWI. Read his _An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle Theologie and the French Crisis of Modernity_.
Kirwan is not a completely reliable guide for ressourcement theology. He has a strong animus against it and his scholarship is tainted by that animus. I don’t mind that he disagrees with ressourcement thought. That is not my beef. I have many good friends, theologians, who do not like ressourcement theology. Life would be boring if we all agreed all the time! My beef with Kirwan is that he presents a very one sided analysis that is not fair to many of the thinkers he deals with. He is an interesting scholar and I do read him. But in reading him you need to be aware of his very strong biases. Just as in reading me you need to be aware of the fact that I am on the editorial board of Communio, was a Balthasar scholar, and not a fan of scholasticism.
Thank you for that.
We need another Council with its accompanying documents to explicate the kerygma more explicitly. For example, acknowledging that Christ died for our sins, such a Council could emphasize where the preponderance of sin appears in our current age. And, as a corollary to that emphasis, an explication of the need for the regular use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and making a confession to a priest for healing. After Vatican II, making recourse to the Sacrament of Penance came to a screeching halt (and, with it, the notion that sin went out of existence).
I have long thought that many people in the pews misunderstand the heading in missals and missalettes at the end of the penitential act
“the absolution by the priest follows
“Misereatur nostri …”
I am well aware of the cautionary note in GIRM about this ‘absolution’ lacking sacramental effect, but very few read GIRM, and even fewer remember much of it. I do however recall my childhood, when I would say to the priest “Misereatur tui …”. The priest would later repeat the sentiment to the servers, and the comment (where it existed) stood before the next prayer by the priest “Indulgentiam, absolutionem …”
It may only be a subliminal effect but I am increasingly sure this has been bad for people, particularly as I increasingly see people crossing themselves during the prayer, despite the priest not doing so.
It seems to me the Council was always meant to give these very things -and with renewed impetus; and not overshadow them or diminish them or replace them. Overly involved attitudes from whatever standpoint or side, to the Council, have it in common to fault or praise the Council for “their absence”. In fact the absence is precisely the matter of sin received and perpetuated now more than three generations coming down from before the Council.
One can almost say “Everyone then goes off and does what he wants done best anyway.” Things flying in every direction including theology with bishops seemingly at a loss what to do. The young and upcoming have too many contradictions to sort through beyond their own means.
Actually recently Fr. Murr reasserted the (good) view concerning the meaning and use of synod. See in the LIFESITE video clip link.
This is a section in the Chapp bluestocking -:
‘ Followers of influential theologians, including Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, viewed Vatican II as a first step toward a second Reformation that would completely change the constitutive nature of basic Catholic doctrines. But such radically revisionist theologies cannot be said to have been the majority view at the council, as any objective reading of the texts will confirm … ‘
https://www.lifesitenews.com/episodes/is-the-church-committing-suicide-cardinal-zens-warning/?utm_source=featured_video&utm_campaign=usa
We need another Council with its accompanying documents to explicate the kerygma more explicitly. For example, acknowledging that Christ died for our sins, such a Council could emphasize where the preponderance of sin appears in our current age.
Please no more documents. If the mark of a lawless society is a proliferation of laws, the mark of faithlessness is a proliferation of theological documents. Written of course as weighty tomes, in dense and tedious prose and tinder for constant subversion.
Yes doesn’t that then bring us to the right use of synod as indicated by Fr. Murr. There would be some synods in conflict whether simultaneous or following after one another “openly competing” but above all the Church herself would be fully cognizant what was taking place. Hence we’ve been looking to the Pontiff expectantly
Precisely as represented or prefigured in these pages already. What got logged so far is the unfortunate “synodality” supposition/presupposition aiming at moderating and/or policing the entire assembly “because that’s what synods do”.
If I never read another article on the “meaning” of Vatican II, it will be too soon. Despite being well-intentioned by some and subversively guided by others, the Council must ultimately be judged by its fruits after sixty years. The verdict is in: it was an unmitigated disaster. It led to a dramatic loss of faith among the laity, a steep decline in religious vocations, and the reduction of the Church—from a mission founded by Christ for the salvation of souls—to something that often resembles a left-leaning NGO.
Enough already.
Gregory, let’s rephrase your statement for a different historical period.
Imagine being a Catholic in 380 who is frustrated with the fact that 55 years after the dogma was officially defined at Nicaea, there are still large numbers of laity and some not uninfluential clerics who are still pushing Arianism, including the Emperor. Heck, another council is planned to be convened in the imperial capital of Constantinople to define (again!) the teaching for which St. Athanasius suffered, and others gave their lives.
“If I never read another article on the “meaning” of Nicaea, it will be too soon. Despite being well-intentioned by some and subversively guided by others, the Council must ultimately be judged by its fruits after fifty-five years. The verdict is in: it was an unmitigated disaster.”
Or the fact that after Trent, and the loss of Catholics through apostasy during the Reformation, many of the same abuses that had led frustrated Germans, Scandinavians, and Frenchmen out of the Church were still prevelant, from the most rural parishes to Rome itself.
Were Nicaea and Trent failures? Heck, for every problem solved by an ecumenical council, new ones popped up. Were Ephesus and Chalcedon therefore also failures?
That’s silly. Arianism for centuries after Nicaea because civil authorities kept imposing it. Was Trent a failure because civil societies imbued with the Enlightenment constantly try to frustrate its reforms, culminating in the eighteenth century with nothing short of persecution of the Church by the Bourbo and Habsburg monarchies. After Vatican II the Enlightenment’s mentality was given official status within the Church to a degree, causing an obvious crisis. Like the early peiod after Nicaea, we are still in the Tridentine Church. We know what to do.
“Imagine being a Catholic in 380 who is frustrated with the fact that 55 years after the dogma was officially defined at Nicaea, there are still large numbers of laity and some not uninfluential clerics who are still pushing Arianism, including the Emperor.”
Vatican II was called, as we read in this article, to confront challenges of modernity. At the same time many people like you try to defend it by comparing it to well respected councils of long ago. As such, it seems almost dishonest to judge aftermatch of 1960s council, by comparing it to situation from 4th century.
Also, you say that 55 years after Nicaea there were still people oposing dogma proclaimed at it. What relevance it has to Vatican II, which proclaimed no dogma? Which seems to be a real problem with Vatican II.
“Hindsight is 20/20, and the Council fathers, in one sense, could hardly be faulted for just presuming that its texts would be interpreted faithfully from within the theological categories of the entire tradition. Especially since the actual texts go out of their way to position the conciliar teachings firmly within the tradition!”
For me it is an example of treating Vatican II as Hindu sacred cow (or something like that). Dr Chapp put a lot of blame on the pre-counciliar Church, while at the same time try to whitewash anything doing with Vatican II. Just after the words that “Vatican II had flaws like all councils”, we read in the above “the Council fathers, in one sense, could hardly be faulted” for dr Chapp called “the chief flaw of Vatican II”. I judge this a bias.
“The strategy of the saboteurs was to try and portray Vatican II as more of a “rupturist event” rather than a set of normative texts embedded within the tradition, thus enabling them to ignore the actual words of the Council in favor of a culturally conditioned “spirit of Vatican II”. This is by now a cliché observation, but one that bears repeating. The Council was manipulated, distorted, and betrayed by a well-organized group of theologians in league with certain influential prelates. And any objective reading of the actual conciliar texts is all the evidence one needs to substantiate this claim of betrayal. It was, in fact, a kind of ecclesial coup d’état, the effects of which are still with us.”
Taking this for granted, we must say, that council that is portrayed as “good response to the challenges of modernity”, provide itself with no real guard before one of such challenges: manipulations of rapturist.
KZiemain – Well put. Who wrote and voted overwhelmingly for the Council documents? The bishops. Who are the chief teachers in a diocese? The bishops. So we are supposed to accept the fact that the bishops returned to their diocese after Vat II, the theologians in their diocese distorted the actual documents to “the spirit of Vat II, and the bishops bear no responsibility for this?
I liked your statement of treating Vatican II as a Hindu sacred cow. I am not a Vatican II Catholic, and not a Synodal Catholic. I I am a 21 council Catholic.
“And perhaps we can now stop arguing about Marian titles and worry more about emulating Mary’s prayer to “cast down the mighty from their thrones and to lift up the lowly.” In other words, to put on Marian subjectivity so we can live, radically, the wild ride that is Christological objectivity, and its clarion call to “come up higher”.”
Dr Chapp told us that Vatican II was a great success as theological council, but failed on pastoral level. Putting aside question, how council that declare no dogma or put forward in similar “hard fashion” any doctrine, can be theological success story, why must face this one. After declaring Vatican II as theological success and pastoral catastrophe, we are told to ignore theological question of Our Queen titles. What?
I just cannot make sense of this article. It seems that dr Chapp says “You need to go forward.”, just to say 30 seconds latter “You need to go backward.”.
What Dr. Chapp does so well is lay out the field. Also he comes back at the same problem anew to refresh the subject and put other views on it. Above, I was only poking a little fun at him. May I repeat three things I mentioned elsewhere, two are on VATICAN II, one is Marian title Queen of Heaven. That of course other writers might have mentioned also.
1. We have to put ourselves under the Council in faith; which embraces the Church Precepts. Looking at the Documents, they are laid out for that, by Paul VI.
2. The Marian title Mother of the Church is in LG a dogmatic document; effectively declaring that title as the fifth Marian dogma. Again emphasizing point 1.
3. The movement for putting Redemptrix as the fifth Marian dogma would need to correct their numbering sequence. But I am suggesting it should be Queen of Heaven not Redemptrix. When this is declared it will fulfill the Coronation celebration. Again we are put under point 1.
I would add a fourth consideration now, also going under point 1.
4. It may be suggested the next dogmatic title should be Mother of Divine Grace. I would have imagined that this title was only completely fulfilled after the BVM was crowned.
I just cannot make sense of this article. It seems that dr Chapp says “You need to go forward.”, just to say 30 seconds latter “You need to go backward.”
Welcome to the hermeneutic of continuity! Squares are circles, we can’t go back, but Vatican II recaptures ancient Patristic thought!
Nonsense. Please point out to me where I said in the article that “you can’t go back”? Indeed, I said the opposite insofar as my emphasis was upon the Council reaching back beyond scholasticism to supplement scholasticism with a greater emphasis on the patristic era. And that would include Augustine. I think you are confusing the fact that I argue against truncating and freezing the tradition into a scholastic/Baroque form with the idea that I am against “going back”. I am in no way arguing against going back. In fact, it is the scholastics who opposed going back to anything older than their own tradition. You are in such a rush to make fun of “the hermeneutic of continuity” as the “squaring of circles” that you forgot to actually pay attention to what I actually argued for.
The illiterati strike again!
The point of the council was to take away tradition. It was a chastisement. Very simple, you want to be pagans we will give it to you. Slowly you’ll discover what you gave up and return with fervor. You don’t need to have a degree in theology to see that.
Interesting comment.
“What if we can now see with greater clarity that the primary strength of Vatican II was that it was a council of theologians, by theologians and for theologians?”
Dr Chapp, please explain to me, if this is true, while I read on USCCB page “Both documents refer to the Church as the People of God, reflecting a new appreciation of lay people that surfaced repeatedly at the Council.”? https://www.usccb.org/10-ways-vatican-ii-shapes-church-today
I heard so may time that “Vatican II was a laity council” and now you saying to me that it was “a council of theologians, by theologians and for theologians”?
It is a council in search of a rationale, in the light of all the disasters that ensued after it. And so we have competing and contradictory rationales put forward, sometimes by the same rationalizers.
Ceterum censeo, Fr. Hunwicke, c.a.p.d., was right on here:
https://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-is-to-be-done-about-council.html
The Council had a strong theological focus on the role of the laity in the Church. Especially in Lumen Gentium. This is why the Council is often regarded as a Council that focused on the laity. However, that does not mean that the Council was a Council led by the laity. It wasn’t. It was an affair of the bishops and their theological advisors. There was a lot of theologizing about the laity, but there was very little lay participation. And that is as it should be since this was an ecumenical council.
The council was called for a reason, yes. But sometimes exhaustion happens for a good and justified reason too.
Speaking as a 40-something Catholic millennial, I don’t think the council is irrelevant, but I’m convinced that “Is X faithful to the real Council?” is always the wrong question to ask — for the most recent council and all the ones before that.
Catholics should be focusing on their faithfulness to Christ, and producing fruit that abides.
If some theologian decides that whatever comes of that was all along in the spirit of the real Vatican II, then hooray for them.
If other theologians decide that some endeavor among Catholic laity or clergy is regressive or baroque and therefore unfaithful to the real Vatican II, despite the good that it’s doing, then that’s a problem for those theologians but not a real problem for the Church.
In either case, the saints who are actually doing apostolic work could probably care less about that.
And that is how it should be.
A pastoral Council meant to address contemporary problems cannot be expected to be entirely relevant forever. Even if it were the best of Councils, and implemented perfectly.
I would be interested in the theologians writing up where the Council developed doctrine, what it developed from, and what into. If any Council theologians could be prevailed upon to do that, perhaps before the Council turns 100… they do not seem overly eager. This is because the doctrine of a Council, regardless of which Council it is, remains relevant forever.
Some would say that the Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) is doctrinal, in that it completes what was being done at the First Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium articulates the relationship between the Papacy as the successor of St. Peter and the Bishops as successors of the other Apostles in collegiality with the Pope. The First Vatican Council was never adjourned, only “suspended” because Rome had been invaded and the Vatican under siege by military forces intent on forming a consolidated and secular nation-state.
See Chapter 3 and the integral Prefatory/Explanatory Note (inserted by Pope Paul VI to remove possible ambiguity) usually published the very end of the document.
Sweet gums! Too many of you are out of sorts on VATICAN II and Chapp’s bluestocking routine pulls out your teeth with ease like they were set in cheesecakes and creme caramel and tiramisu. And if he didn’t pull them out they would rot right so where they sit.
“It led to a dramatic loss of faith among the laity, a steep decline in religious vocations, and the reduction of the Church—from a mission founded by Christ for the salvation of souls—to something that often resembles a left-leaning NGO.“
I beg to differ. American Catholic priests are increasingly traditional conservatives serving up spiritual pablum to gullible local parishioners.
So, the pews are splitting under the great weight they bear weekly?
The seminaries are all full and turning men away?
New Churches are going up everywhere?
We see endless weddings and baptisms?
OCIA classes are full?
The Bishops don’t seem to spend all their time on foisting illegal aliens on us and doing so with duplicitous words like “undocumented” and “migrant”, running a multimillion dollar enterprise funded by the government?
You’re in no position to call anybody “gullible”.
I beg to differ. Dave. Younger, American Catholic priests are increasingly prayerful, scripturally literate, liturgically reverent, and sincerely desirous of bringing their parishioners into a deeper relationship with Christ.
That’s what surveys conducted have found also.
Perhaps they’re reading something other than the documents of VII?
Please define spiritual pablum. Thank you.
Chapp ventures a description here:
‘ When this state of conceptual and cultural exhaustion is reached, the relative “peace” of the status quo, with its modus vivendi between warring parties having been in place for a long while, always seems preferable. And so, a quiet mediocrity of compromised frustration takes root, with nobody quite satisfied with the results, but all in agreement that “extremes” need to be avoided. However, what now counts as “extreme” is daring to insist that the topics in play are still of vital importance and that the pablum of a “no man’s land” form of the Faith, where nothing of any real substance is ever debated, is not sustainable in the long run. ‘
‘ I think it is too early to write the obituary of Vatican II. And a simplistic return to the structure and theology of post-Tridentine Baroque Catholicism would be a pastoral mistake of the highest order. ‘
Carl Olson, I apologize for my biting comment now withheld. Someone had contrived an obituary in a sardonic style of the Council and put it on YOUTUBE and elsewhere not CWR and it provoked me. It was presented online subsequent to Chapp’s article here. What that author should do is come here by his own name and state his case. I believe he is a sedevacantist but I am not sure; but if not he is quite cynical as a rule when it comes to VATICAN II and its Popes. And maybe he feels outdone by the Paul VI declaration on Mother of the Church. Aside from the overall general “traditional” position he claims, his theming stifles development as if development was always anathema and his single approach to tradition and theology is the only one and impeccable.
The idea that there is some “authentic” Council of Vatican II waiting to be rediscovered – as opposed to an “inauthentic” interpretation of said Council – is pure fantasy. When the Council closed, the same bishops who had approved the Council documents promptly went home to their dioceses and implemented them. They knew how to properly interpret what they had discussed, written and voted for. The resulting catastrophe for the Church IS the true spirit of the Council.
For more than a few, I’d offer that VII is viewed – as a certain Josef Cardinal Ratzinger adamantly insisted it should avoid – as a Super Dogma, an event which supercedes absolutely everything that came prior to it and which also absolutely binds us into the future as the one and only standard of what it means to be a Catholic. As a number of priestly contributors have indicated in letters to this site , their seminary education focused almost exclusively on the documents of VII, and very little from other sources, including Aquinas or Augustine.
Others take positions similar to John Paul II’s and Larry Chapp’s, namely that VII was largely a good and necessary thing that was simply implemented improperly or incorrectly, and if we simply try again, and return to the Council’s “true” meaning, good things are bound to happen. Just be patient, eh?
For my part, I view VII as certainly a valid, legitimate council, as it was convened by the Pope, its documents vetted and approved by the bishops and ratified once again by the Pope.
I also regard VII as a colossal and wholly avoidable failure, a pure disaster which did immense harm to the Church, of which some prescient observers warned at the time, and the harmful effects of which largely bind us at present. Although the force-fed reform of the liturgy was, in my view, the biggest single failure executed on the Council’s authority, there are many other aspects of its bulky documents which provided the impetus for the radical and destructive policies implemented shortly after 1965. It’s an interesting exercise to re-read the Council’s documents and see them them as very much an essence of the- ’60s exercise, filled with grandiose visions of a bright new world, etc. all of which appear comically naïve and presumptuous from the vantage point of today.
I don’t write this assessment with any pleasure at all: I sincerely wish that the bright hopes and expectations of 60 years ago had come to fruition as so many very smart people predicted that they would. i also cannot recommend any instant cure for the sinking circumstances in which much of the Church is currently mired. A good star, however, might be to face the unpleasant truth about the Council’s catastrophe, and wonder what oath to take in our present situation. If there are aspects or suggestions in VII, by all means make use of them. But please, please recall Cardinal Ratzinger’s admonition: the Council was not a Super Dogma, and we should not continue to be bound to it as if that were true.
A couple of typos: In my last paragraph, I wrote “oath” instead of “path;” in the next sentence I meant to write “if there are useful aspects or suggestions in Vii.”
Sorry, a typist I am not.
Dr. Chapp says, “They further understood that standard scholastic theology had failed to inspire and breathe fire into the Church’s doctrinal equations.”
This seems to betray the danger of metaphysically soft and experientially heavy theology. If theology is valued primarily for the impressions it makes, its effect is inherently transient, fading as novelty gives way to familiarity. The more intelligible theology is, the more enduring it will be; the more it is written to impress at the cost of clarity, the less it lasts. Both intelligibility and the capacity to inspire are valuable, but only intelligibility can be reliably ensured, and it is precisely this grounding in truth that allows theology to continue orienting contemplation and worship across time. In reality, it’s only contemplation that keeps theology and the hearts of men burning.
“In reality, it’s only contemplation that keeps theology and the hearts of men burning.” Love this line. But that is the very point of ressourcement theology. To reorient theology toward the mystery of the Incarnation, and to have a theology that leads one to prayer. In fact, Balthasar often said that what we need is a “kneeling theology”. I apologize if I was not clear in the article. I in no way want to portray ressourcement theology as “metaphysically soft” and “experientially heavy” as opposed to the “hard truths of scholasticism”. As someone who did his doctoral dissertation on Balthasar’s trinitarian metaphysics as the grounding for this theology of Revelation, I can sadly attest to the fact that it took me four years to master the density of his metaphysics. It was not soft! I probably overemphasizes the fact that scholasticism “failed to inspire”. My friend Matthew Minerd will chastise me for that. But in an already too long essay some “shorthand” is needed even if it sometimes leads to ambiguity of meaning.
In the Book of Jonah, God tells Jonah that it is indeed a difficult situation with the people and even the land, when He says they do not know their right from their left but He wasn’t about to simply wipe out all the cattle for it. God didn’t blame anyone, He merely insisted Jonah should get on answering the call.
CWR platform allows some discussion but it is not a synod. When a real synod is done, it has to take official account of its own process and result, some minimum documenting will be needed. While some of it can happen in digitized form, they necessarily have to generate and retain their own records. Digitization is not as durable as other forms and online and cloud etc. do not yield sole ownership or authenticity. And in a real synod they will not target 50 questions at once all having to be reconciled with the State of Israel.
Let’s put VATICAN II in right context.
Pelagianism could be seen as a cultural disease; Arianism a theological disease; Jansenism a state-based or secularist disease; Modernism a collocation disease.
The Council is none of those.
Those who have failed the Council or continue to fail the Council, have done so or have been doing so, by any number or mix of causes. Among them Chapp hits on bunker mentality which is affecting all sides including the “overly conservative” and the “over-liberal”; yet the Council is not bunker mentality and if it were projecting that, it would be bad.
The Council itself is the empowerment both to correct all of the deviances as well as stand forth against them as may be needed. The antidote is given for the worst of them, Modernism.
Now what is wrong with some of you Americans. American fidelity in faith underpinned the Council and its era and the great papacies with that from WWI through JPII and Benedict. The insecurities expressed with so much vehemence at times is 1. unfaithfulness, 2. pathology in self-defeat, 3. obstruction to real progress, 4. obstinacy if habitualized.
‘ In reality, all of that so-called “theological verbiage” of the Council was in the service of constructing a renewed understanding of Revelation and its ecclesial mediations as a Trinitarian/Christological reality which alone could ground a renewed theological anthropology worthy of the challenges of modernity. Condemnations and anathemas would achieve nothing except a smug comfort in our own rightness. What was needed instead was a theological and metaphysical vision deep enough and broad enough to position the Church’s message as the deeper cosmology and the deeper anthropology. And, therefore, as the deeper and only truly authentic “humanism”. ‘
But the question, once again, is why did things go so quickly and disastrously wrong?
Mr. Ricketts,
I believe it has something to do with original sin.
But Trent Horn has a video on his youtube channel about “The Decade That Broke American Catholicism” that you might find informative.
Also, highly recommend going to Larry Chapp’s blog Gaudium et Spes 22, or simply read his articles here at CWR, to get some insight into the fact that the Church in the 1950s was not in a healthy place.
Thanks for the response, much appreciated. I am indeed a regular reader here, but thanks for the references. Parts of the Church in the 1950’s may indeed not have in a healthy place, but it is now in a much unhealthier place that at that time. I for one think that the negative diagnosis of the Church back the day is often exaggerated. Be that as it may, I also think that the much derided “gloomsayers” were indeed prescient in their predictions as to the likely outcome of a council. Their chief error was that they underestimated the extent of the catastrophe.
If I may I’d like to recommend for your reading interest the recent book “Mass Exodus,” by British sociologist Stephen Bullivant who, as you may recall, has been interviewed here at CWR.
In any case, I can’t see how the solution to the Church’s present predicament lies in endless searches for the “real meaning” of VII. As I noted in another comment above, if there is anything useful in the Council’s decrees, let us by all means make use of them. But cannot continue to be harnessed to it simply because it occurred.
The issue is, what are the right and true things to be done.
Well said, Dr. Chapp
Lots of references to Doctrine and Dogma and Cosmology and Anthropology.
How about the “Apostles Creed”?
“Lumen Gentium” is, in so many ways, an extended unpacking and assertion of the Creeds.
“Dei Verbum”?
Thank you for your response Dr. Chapp. And I have enjoyed some of your exchanges with Dr. Minerd. I am currently trying to work through when/why theology and contemplation became divorced. God Bless!