The Vatican II Church explained from Mattias Desmet's psychological terms

A friend wrote me not long ago, saying,

I am reminded of the fact that without a rock to cling to, one becomes wreckage the ship of state upon the waters. The church is the answer, but certainly not certain members of the hierarchy to be sure. We still have to listen to who has the truth.

Indeed. The "modern world" is by definition an idea in which rocks, foundations, psychological safe harbors of all sorts are eschewed. The modern world doesn't want "rocky people" who are – as the notorious Bergoglio says – "rigid". Rocks are rigid. That's why we harvest them, carve them, and use them when we want to build solid, such as enduring solid architecture or solid sacred altars. Rocks endure. But "Modernism", the Church heresy, is all about "evolution", how we are so smart and so sophisticated we are that we don't need a solid foundation, or a dogmatic faith, and certainly no traditional morality or worship.

The result is a nearly dead Church, the Mainstream Church of empty churches we are all so familiar with; nearly empty except for old folks who "came of age" in the frothy 1960s. The 1960s were like the 1920s and the "Gay '90s" of the end of the 19th century, the original fin-de-siecle era Mark Twain so adroitly titled "The Gilded Age". WWI put paid to the "Gay '90s" and the Great Depression put paid to the Roaring '20s. The 1960s were more successful in polluting our souls, however, precisely because the radicals had invaded and polluted the Church herself. Before the '60s, the Church had stood as "the Rock" and foundation of sanity, the bastion of psychological certainty. But with Vatican II, all that went kaput. We were all cast adrift without an enduring social bond, without the sense-making ability when life gets tough, with all of us drowning in free-floating anxiety and an ever-present, uneasy free-floating psychological discontent.

The changes in the 1960s and 1970s Church left us adrift on psychological free-floating anxiety. But we're not supposed to be zombies, still less slaves to cheap passions and lusts and passing fancies, but instead we were to be true servants of God; thus, we are at daggers drawn with ourselves now – and our useless CEO-style bishops, who have replaced metaphysics with politics (I didn't think that up, BTW) are absolutely, truly, and most sincerely incapable of dealing with our civilizational crisis! They consult neither Holy Writ nor the Church Fathers, but they consult polls, because for them it is all politics.

One would do well to reread St. John's Gospel Chapter 10, all of it (it's long), a number of times, to the end. Notice how Our Lord plainly says there He knows His sheep and His sheep know Him. Notice how He expects us to recognize Him. The social bond He offers is strong. He expects us to respond to that. And He inspires us in that social bond. He says He leads them and dies for them, but the hired shepherds don't do that. Then the Jews, properly translated "Judeans" in St. John, harass Him and then try to kill Him via stoning. They embody the rejection of a solid social bond; they certainly reject Christ as "sense-maker" of life, as does so much of the modern world, obviously, itself so much shaped as it is by non-believers in entertainment, law, and banking.

The world Christ offers is different than that. Psychological anxiety and discontent do not exist in such an environment as He offers, but much of the Church has distanced itself (major elements of it have, not all of it by any means) from Christ the King. Tomorrow* is the Feast of Christ the King in the TLM. Search out such a Mass and "enter in" to the narthex of Christ's Kingdom, the TLM. Otherwise, try to worship in the modern Church that the descendants of those unbelievers in St. John 10 approve for us.

In the meantime, most of the modern world will be following the Beasts of Revelation, worshiping these monsters as gods because they no longer know God, do not recognize His Kingship and are alien to our Heavenly Fatherland, either spiritual or temporal.

Grim times, indeed.

Μόχθων δ’ ουκ άλλος ύπερθεν ή γας πατρίας στέρεσθαι.

There is no greater grief that the loss of one’s fatherland.

—  Euripides, 480-406 BC, Ancient Greek tragedian ‐ Medea

(Euripides knew all about free-floating psychological anxiety.)

*The priests of the TLM celebrate this feast on the last Sunday of October, and on the last Sunday before Advent in the Novus Ordo. In the Vetus Ordo, it immediately precedes the Feast of All Saints on November 1, which itself immediately precedes All Souls on November 2. 

PS November was sacred to the Ancient Celts, as Samhain, the seam on the iron tire of the year, when the old year bends around to meet the new year, and the dead and living could intermingle. The Irish kept strong remnants of this and eventually it gave rise to Halloween in English-speaking countries, a secular "Day of the Dead", as it were. As if it could not be made more shallow by commercializing it, modern "pagans" actually use it for their "religion", which cretinizes it profoundly.