An excerpt:
On the historical level, however, Vatican II constitutes a non-decomposable block: It has its own unity, its essence, its nature. Considered in its origins, its implementation and consequences, it can be described as a Revolution in mentality and language, which has profoundly changed the life of the Church, initiating a moral and religious crisis without precedent. If the theological judgment may be vague and comprehensive, the judgment of history is merciless and without appeal. The Second Vatican Council was not only unsuccessful or a failure: it was a catastrophe for the Church.
End of excerpt.
An Préachán – Indeed, that first quoted paragraph is a concentrated knock-out punch, a "right cross" to the jaw of anyone who wants to argue that Vatican II, and its still churning, decomposing aftermath, was anything but a true "crash and burn." Three recent essays are important to mention in this regard:
✔First, Martin
Mosebach: Pope Benedict’s Red Thread
N.B This is now the Foreward in Peter Kwasniewsk's Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages, where it is titled For Pope Benedict XVI, On His Ninetieth Birthday.
✔Second, Eric Sammons' challenge: Evangelization, Vatican II, and Censorship
✔And thirdly, Phil Lawler
takes up Eric Sammons’ challenge:
I highly recommend all three, in order.
Back to Professor De Mattei; he writes, "...The judgment of history is merciless and without appeal." It is, for those who are willing to see it. As Anthony Esolen writes here:
"When people praise me for perspicacity, I shake
my head and reply that almost all of what I do is to notice what is in front of
my nose, and write about it. Almost all of what I do is to refrain from shutting my eyes toward what is right
there, plain as day. It’s not that I notice it and others don’t. It’s that I
won’t un-notice it. I won’t pretend not to see what I do see, and what
everybody else sees too."
For example, basically, from what one can glean from the various reports and studies, half the Catholics of the U.S. (to give a pretty well-known example) just left. I myself have talked to "old folks" who tell me they were just getting out of school in the early 1960s, and they just left. Twelve years of Catholic Ed and poof, they're outta there. Never looked back. "Good riddance to nonsense" kind of attitude.
And think a moment about why: Image the mind's shock at what happened in the '60s: you, your parents, your grand-parents and so on were probably immigrants within the 150 years previous to Vatican II. Most Catholics were ethnics, such as Esolen, an Italian, or my people from Ireland. That and their papist religion set them back in Protestant America. For every cocky soulless "Catholic" character who became a Protestant and then a Mason, there were millions of "salt-of-the-earth" types who kept the Faith, whatever it cost them. And it cost 'em a lot, from a worldly point of view.
As with millions of others, Esolen's parents and grand-parents worked like Trojans to provide for their families AND the Church. Catholic churches had to be built, furnished, decorated, oftentimes by bringing the necessary experts from the Old Country. Schools had to be built and maintained. Religious orders had to be supported to do the teaching. The whole Catholic American infrastructure took serious coin. And along with the financial cost, chronological and spiritual sacrifices were made: ALL to maintain a Mass in Latin, a specialized, set-apart clergy and religious who spoke and taught the same Latin, all to support that whole "Catholic thing".
And then one day they were told: "Hey, turns out that wasn't necessary after all! Toss it!"
Remember what old Hannibal Bugnini is quoted as saying:
“We must strip from our
Catholic prayers and our Catholic liturgies everything which can be the shadow
of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, Protestants.
L’Osseratore Romano, 19
March 1965, quoted in Michael Davies.
Nine years later the Bug expressed satisfaction that
the ensuing reform was “…a major conquest of the Roman Catholic Church.”
The psychological shock must have been devastating. I've heard stories of kids who watched as their parents took out their Latin-English missals and burned them in the backyard because the local priest told them to. Could a kid ever forget that? Try to imagine the shock of seeing what you were told was immemorial and eternal and see it replaced with the worst sort of chintzy banality that the wretched '60s and 70s could produce. (And that's saying something, because those decades were as shallow and empty-souled as any time in history! Incredibly, they even make the Bourbons look classy.)It was the Vatican I Church, (that avatar of the Church from the election of Pope Pius IX in 1846 and culminating in Vatican I, and which lasted to Vatican II), hadn't drilled into lay Catholics the idea that priests and the hierarchy were NEVER to be questioned, and that bishops were just secretaries to the pope, get-the-coffee types even though the Vatican I council reaffirmed bishops were direct successors of the Apostles. The Vat2 Revolution could not have happened without that conditioning. The "Reformers" cynically used 100 years of "Do not question us" to further their ends.
“So in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
With our own feathers, not by others' hands,
Are we now smitten.”
―Aeschylus
(The Greeks knew everything.)
Being of the Irish-speaking persuasion, I have the attitude: "These (insert unprintable description here) don't have the right now, and they didn't then, to deprive me of my religious heritage." I've just sort of been waiting for some hierarch to tell me X, or Y, or Z, as in the old Modernist party line about the TLM and the old Church: I've just been waiting. And of course that's not charitable, and according to Canon 212 we have to be polite with the clergy. But Grrr, grrrr, grrr. Somehow, someway, the spirit of St. Columbanus runs in me. (And see also here.)
Indeed, when I'm in the exquisite TLM I attend here in Budapest, once in while the thought occurs to me (not as much now as early on in my TLM attendance) and it's a shocking thought: "Those people, the "reformers" wanted to take this away from meself AND me kids, all this spiritual, soul-filling beauty; they wanted to make it extinct." Of course, that's not going to happen now. But the restoration, the reconquista, is going to be long. From God's point of view, that's fine. A lot of time for charity, from his perspective, especially from Trad Catholics to the other sorts. And that's not going to be easy.
It's just our penance. Bergoglio is our penance. It could be worse.
An Préachán
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