Two documents, both episcopal but both quite different, have captured my attention these last few weeks. The first was the motu proprio of Pope Francis, Magnum principium, devolving primary responsibility for the liturgical translations to bishops’ conferences. It has already been dealt with on this site here and here and here, but one thing from it lingers in the mind: that “great principle” of the title, which is really something of a great misrepresentation:
The great principle, established by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, according to which liturgical prayer be accommodated to the comprehension of the people so that it might be understood, required the weighty task of introducing the vernacular language into the liturgy and of preparing and approving the versions of the liturgical books, a charge that was entrusted to the Bishops.
One searches in vain through the conciliar decree on the liturgy for anything that adequately justifies this bold assertion. Whoever drafted this for the pope got away with quite the deception. But then, the new liturgy is based on misrepresentations and deceptions, as revealed by the unbowdlerized history of the Council that has been emerging these last few years from the pens of many scholars. Of course they are only taking up the work of Fr Wiltgen’s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (1967), in which the liberal-leaning author guilelessly lays open to view the machinations by which the liberal minority manipulated the majority; and of Michael Davies, whose trilogy Liturgical Revolution gives, in immense detail, the workings, context and implications of the highly-flawed Council proceedings and aftermath.
The other document was the pastoral letter this past weekend from Bishop Egan of Portsmouth, to mark his 5th anniversary as bishop of the diocese. As usual from Bishop Egan, there is nothing doctrinally questionable in his teaching, and indeed much that is encouraging in his optimistic and active orthodox vision of the life of our diocese. One thing is striking though: he makes no mention of the Council, either in the text or in the footnotes. While he adopts a couple of tendencies that mark modern Catholicism of both the sound and less-sound type, this failure to mention the Council seems very positive.
Since I hold no office there is a freedom for me to say what follows that many other clergy (and even lay academics) would not have (assuming that they agree with me, which I know many do).
The reason I think Bishop Egan was right not to mention the Council (though I am not saying he did this with deliberation) is that it is time now to let go of the Council. It happened over half a century ago, was conditioned by and directed to the world of the 1960s, a world that has changed beyond recognition as of 2017. It described itself as a pastoral council, and it sought to repackage the teaching, life and worship of the Church to suit a world in flux. For this very reason the Council was necessarily going to have a best-before date. That date has been passed. The sad thing is that its milk turned sour very soon after packaging.
Bishop Egan reports that Mass attendance in the diocese is 13% of the Catholic population. Just after the Council (when things had already started to change) Mass attendance in England (I do not have a figure for Portsmouth but it would have been in the vicinity of this national figure) was just under 53%. In a Church that had been reshaped to meet modern needs, with a liturgy likewise adapted as never before, Catholic practice by the most obvious measure plummeted. Dr Joe Shaw has demonstrated that according to other measures, such as ordinations to the priesthood, Catholic vitality has plummeted.
By any reasonable standard of judgment the application of the Council failed, miserably, to achieve the Council’s aims. This statistical revelation of decline is quite apart from the decline experienced by Catholics as they have seen dogmas, doctrines, morals and many other elements of Catholic life thrown into chaos in the wake of the Council. St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, in their different ways and according to their lights, attempted to stem the ecclesial wasting away. But while ever the main nutrition of the Church was based on the Council (usually very loosely) then the Church will ever be gaining a pound a losing two.
Of course the decline is not universal. The Church grows apace in the developing world, where a different social and attitudinal dynamic is at work. The Church is growing in the West in certain places too. But here’s the rub: it is growing precisely where much of what was discarded by the post-conciliaristas is slowly and sensibly being reclaimed and integrated into the world of 2017 rather than the mid-1960s. What they are reclaiming is essential, timeless Catholicism rather than the tired mantras and shibboleths of the “Vatican II Church”. The young have discovered, and many of the older re-discovered, that there was a Church before Vatican II, and it was healthy, vital and beautiful.
So, despite the many virtues of the Council documents, and some its beautiful passages of theological lyricism, they are so laden with deliberate ambiguities, and have been so abused and misrepresented in their application, that are fit only for the occasional reference or quotation. They addressed too specifically a world that disappeared soon after the Council; Gaudium et spes was flawed even then, but now it reads almost risibly.
Thus it makes no sense to be constantly referencing every contemporary initiative to Vatican II, for justification or acceptance-value. It is time to move from a post-conciliar Church to a post-post-conciliar Church; which is to say, it is time to reclaim the Church as She has always been in her essence and her stable form, which has been able to function viably and vitally in every age and circumstance since the time of Christ. In the 1960s mankind, not least of the Catholic variety, seemed to think it had found something new under the sun. How old, dated and desiccated that new thing now looks.
Not that there was nothing good from the Council. For example, despite its abuse, the ecumenical initiative articulated by the Council is essentially sound and worthy of ongoing pursuit. But is has to be doctrinally coherent. That Luther could look on the modern Catholic Church in many parts of Europe and declare himself vindicated does not signify ecumenical progress.
I had intended, as signalled above, to discuss Bishop’s Egan desire (and not only his) that all Catholics become missionaries and apostles. This is an aspect of modern Catholicism that while not doctrinally awry is pastorally utopian. But after the above that must await another day.
The most lamentable result of liturgical changes after Vatican II was the manner in which Mass in the vernacular supposedly licensed celebrants to introduce mini homilies at the beginning of Mass instead of commencing with the Entrance Antiphon,to make all kinds of irrelevant asides throughout the Mass,to invite applause for a variety of circumstances, and generally to mess around with the set text of the lectionary to make it politically correct.
Agreed. Lax and indecorous.
Thing is–and I didn’t realize this until I saw it recently– the commentary at the beginning of Mass is actually provided for as an option in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (paragraph 31, https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/the-mass/general-instruction-of-the-roman-missal/girm-chapter-2). Why, I have no idea. That’s what homilies are for, in my opinion.
Fr.Thanks,thanks ,thanks -my view entirely.Vatican 11 ,and its Heresies have dogged Holy Mother Church all these years.We are living in a post conciliar age now and the disease of Vat 11.can whither on the vine.May the Bishop of Rome heed the signs of the time.God bless.
I completely agree with Mr. Johnson and could not have stated my opinion any better. I am one of the pre 60’s generation and would love to see our beautiful church and liturgy as it was in the 1950’s. Thank you Father.
Very much in tune with views I have long expressed. I fear that in seminaries the whole teaching is based on V II to the exclusion of all else.
At some point, a Council rather becomes inseparable from its historical reception – whatever the intention of some (many) of its Fathers. Especially when most of those same Fathers were the very same bishops who fairly obediently went along with (or declined to resist) the revolutionary reception of it.
I sympathize a little with Pope Benedict’s distinction between a Council of the Media versus a Council of the Fathers; but the latter was so quickly and totally subsumed into the former, that it becomes an academic question. And the Council of the Media has been a resounding and lamentable failure on any metric you care to use.
I agree the distinction we make between Council and post-Council, and Council of the Fathers and Council of the Media, are now largely academic, especially since I have grave doubts as to whether the Council of the Fathers can ever be retrieved from the reality of its implementation, which has had half a century to embed itself. My suspicion is that in my time even there will be a Vatican III, or equivalent, to repair the damage.
It is, of course, hardly just Britain which has suffered such catastrophic declines in measurable forms of participation in the Church; in many ways, it is not even the worst off. Recent random data points:
* The Diocese of Pittsburgh announced last week that it is consolidating its 190 parishes into just 48. According to the Diocese’s own figures, Mass attendance, first communions and confirmations are down 40 percent since 2000, while infant baptisms, church marriages and K-8 school enrollment have declined about 50 percent – all while the number of baptized Catholics in the Diocese has only dropped 4% over the same period.
* In May, the Diocese of Hartford in Connecticut announced that out of its 200 parishes, 144 will merge and 26 will close outright. Its statistics of participation are in some respects even worse than Pittsburgh.
* In June, the Diocese of Trier – the oldest diocese in Germany, over 19 centuries old – announced it was closing a staggering 96% of its parishes.
And yet as deep as these cuts are, few imagine they will be the last – or that they will not soon be joined by similar such downsizings in many more dioceses in Western Europe and North America. The collapse accelerates, and yet when the disaster is not being ignored or soft pedaled, almost never will one hear anything but self-justifying explanations for the collapse. “Affluence.” “Secularization.” “Changing economics.” And the occasional targeting of the Church’s sexual teachings.
This is my experience: I received my First Communion on Palm Sunday 1964 when I was 9. I was prepared for it in an essentially pre-Conciliar way. I learned the Catechism, and I already responded, as most children do, to the beauty, order and discipline of the liturgy. Perhaps, too, I already found these things a channel for a subsequent understanding of how beauty, order and discipline communicated important things about the world as God created and intended it. For me, ugliness, chaos and anarchy have tended to represent the world as Man has used and abused the same world. There are some senses in which I thank the Council for making all this so apparent to me, though not without some pain and sufferring at having been deprived for so long by what I once thought I knew, and what I most certainly loved. I hope, that some good may come out of the present crisis with which the Church is faced.
Indeed, there are some ironic fruits of the Council. Bitterly ironic perhaps…
“It is time now to let go of the Council”? What does this mean? Should we “let go” of the First Ecumenical Council of Niceae? Thirty years after Niceae, St. Jerome observed that “the world awoke to find itself Arian.” In other words, “By any reasonable standard of judgment the application of the Council failed, miserably, to achieve the Council’s aims.” Thankfully, faithful Catholics did not “let go.”
The difference is that every other ecumenical council was called to deal with a crisis of faith and government, and they made dogmatic definitions which have eternal authority. Vatican II was explicitly called as a “pastoral” council, a novel entity, and defined no dogma, merely restating things and initiating a process of reform that has emptied churches, seminaries, convents and monasteries. Its reforms have failed on its own measures. It was time-bound. We need to salvage what was good in it and move on. As to the implication that I and those who agree with me are not faithful Catholics; well, we are the ones whose backsides are on pews and in choir stalls, who believe all that the Church requires us to believe, and have patiently endured the destruction of so much that was beautiful in Catholic life without jumping ship. So, do tell me who is faithful, won’t you.
Fr. Hugh, i understand why you would say that “every other ecumenical council was called to deal with a crisis of faith … [and] made dogmatic definitions,” and that the latter – the absence of dogmatic definitions – could explain Vatican II’s novelty, but the latter should not obscure the fact that Vatican II was also called because of a crisis of faith (its in the documents, esp. Gaudium et spes). Furthermore, the process of reform initiated by Vatican II was not the reason why churches, seminaries, convents and monasteries have emptied; correlation, perhaps, but not causation. A better argument can be made that institutions in the Church deteriorated because the reforms of Vatican II had not been implemented; even good people paid little attention to what the Council did and said. Many of them were too busy chasing false interpretations of the Council (as Pope Benedict XVI and others have point out) created by the media and wayward theologians. As for those who held on to the Council, I think of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. It was also they whom I thought of when I said “faithful Catholics did not ‘let go'”. Nonetheless, my remark does imply that you or those who agree with you are being unfaithful. I did not think of that implication at the time. Nonetheless, you would surely agree that people can sit in pews and choir stalls, believe all that the Church requires us to believe and still be unfaithful. Likewise, I’m sure that you would also agree that fidelity to Jesus Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit in the Church entails much more than these things, wouldn’t you?
“Furthermore, the process of reform initiated by Vatican II was not the reason why churches, seminaries, convents and monasteries have emptied; correlation, perhaps, but not causation.”
When the correlation is this overwhelming, there’s a burden of proof on the claimant denying any causation.
Was the post-conciliar reform solely responsible? I don’t think even most traditionalists are arguing that. But was it a key factor? I think it’s hard to deny that it was.
I invite Fr. Hugh and his readers to read the very good article by Fr. Alcuin Reid: http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/10/22/liturgy-authority-and-postmodernity/#sdfootnote2anc
Perhaps, Reid’s expert observations will go a little way to demonstrating my earlier claim that correlation is not causation. Specifically, it is likely that the post-conciliar reform was responsible for many of the aberrations that we have seen in different areas of the Church’s life in the past 60 years. The question that we need to be asking is whether the post-conciliar reform was the reform intended by the fathers of Vatican II. I (and Fr. Reid) contend that it wasn’t, at least not in its entirety. Therefore, it would be foolish to “let the Council go” when the Council has yet to be properly understood and serioiusly implemented.
P.S. Despite the difference b/w the earlier councils and Vatican II that you mention, the analogy that I made in my first response still holds.
Dom Alcuin and I agree on many things, if not most. It is hardly a revelation that one of my main themes has been the fact that Vatican II in its express will is quite different from its implementation. Recent conciliar scholarship reveals that for the corpus of hardcore reformers, the ones who swept to power after the Council in such bodies as Consilium, the Council’s documents are almost irrelevant except as initiating and legitimating an ongoing, and seemingly endless, process of every more radical reform.
The tragedy of Vatican II is twofold, it seems to me. On the one hand it was not faithfully implemented according to its own express wish; on the other hand, what is new in it is so time-bound that it ceases to be relevant today, while what is traditional does not need the Council for its survival.
Thus is why I am increasingly of the opinion that the Council is no longer of much use to the Church, and only serves the liberals as a totem, not as an authoritative guide to reform and renewal. So best to move on. I would wager that in my lifetime there will be another ecumenical council, the task of which will be to clear up the mess of the post-conciliar period. That would require quite a pope to ensure its proper implementation, unless of course the “biological solution” has largely waste liberal ranks by then.
Fr., Your response reminds me of my original comment. You acknowledge that Vatican II was “an authoritative guide to reform and renewal,” and I assume that when you say “authoritative” you accept that VII embodied a movement of the Holy Spirit in the Church. If this is true, then, how can you think that IT is “no longer of much use to the Church”? Why don’t you just say that HE is no longer any use to the Church? Again, you acknowledge that the post-conciliar implementation failed in significant ways, yet you insist that the Council itself is “no longer of much use to the Church.” I just don’t get this reasoning. I would think that the proper conclusion would be to do what we can to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit and assist in the correct implementation of the Council. Finally, if a person’s criteria as to whether an ecumenical council is authoritative is not the council itself but the way it is implemented, then you’d better “let go” Niceae as well because it is still being vociferously debated in academic circles and many in the pews still have an Arian understanding of Christ. Faithfully, Tim
Letting go of Nicaea means letting go of the doctrines it defined.
But what doctrine did Vatican II define?
Some Councils are more successful than others. Some can even be rightly said to be failures (Lateran V, anyone?) Some had pastoral or political prescriptions which fell into desuetude and even came to be seen as embarrassing in subsequent years (Council of Vienne, anyone?).
At some point, it becomes very hard to separate Vatican II from its implementation, however at variance the latter might seem from some of its texts. And for a Council which was expressly intended to be a pastoral, not doctrinal, council, it really does raise the question of how much it can really speak to us now about the crisis in the Church.
Personally, I am deeply regretful that Vatican II ever occurred. There are some small numbers of good points, but the legion of ambiguities throughout the document have been utilized by liberals for decades to make over the Church in their own image and likeness. Too much of what was implemented was jammed down the throats of faithful, orthodox Catholics by fabricating the bogus “spirit of Vatican II.”
I don’t know what “authoritative” means in a situation like this, especially with a so-called pastoral council which has no authority over doctrine and dogma by virtual of its own self-description.
There have been councils overturned by later councils; perhaps some have simply been ignored.
There is NO spirit of Vatican II; just the authentic Holy Spirit, Who cannot be pleased with the conciliar fruits over 50 years later.
I fervently pray the Holy Spirit intervenes to bring about the marginalization if not repudiation of Vatican II. Whatever good there is worth salvaging can be more effectively included in a new corrective council restoring most of what has been destroyed.
Excellent points all around. Vatican II is well past its shelf life. As an addendum on the liturgical problems I would recommend the memoirs of Father Louis Bouyer, a member of Consilium. He lays bare the deception and manipulation that was done to alter the liturgy. https://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Louis-Bouyer-Conversion-Liturgical-ebook/dp/B015QLPJK8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1511671980&sr=8-2&keywords=louis+bouyer
We young Catholics, generally I think, yearn for eternal truths in this liquid and superficial world. The most pastoral thing the Church can do right now is to give the world back the immutable and ritualistic, Rock. The world needs to be warned not comforted. And nobody really wants an appeasing and condescending religion.
You sound typical to me of that section of young Catholics who show an actual commitment to the life of the Church beyond mere Sunday attendance. It’s sad that so many spent so much effort in making the Church more like the world, when the religious impulse itself (to speak in purely human, secular terms) has always to seek meaning and hope outside the grim reality of life in the world. What a fact to forget all of a sudden! Pax tecum.
Thank you for the reply, Father Hugh. I was born and raised Catholic though was not properly catechized, a deficiency I have largely corrected these last several years. In fact, at precisely the time I fell in love with Christ’s Church and found it to be the Truth, it then all began to look so malleable.
For example, I can’t wrap my mind around the notion that Church could have mistakenly taught grave sin for 2,000 years (capital punishment), or that it has been calling something sin which may not be (contraception)…or that we aren’t quite as serious about marriage and adultery as we have taught. What does this do to the claims we make of our Church!? None of the saints and apologists I studied mentioned that formalizing the above was even a remote possibility.
I’m no theologian and probably do not understand the intellectual depths of ‘practices versus teachings, teachings versus doctrine, doctrine vs dogma, etc”, nor the niceties of the pastoral approach. I can only attempt to articulate what I, in my inferior and confused mind, understand as occurring before my eyes. There are influential Catholics, even the Guarantor himself, who think these things! It is quite a shock and I find myself fighting off despair often. All I can do is hide in my: “private theology doesn’t matter”, or “well, it hasn’t changed on paper” stances and then of course pray.
I did digress above I admit!
As a new and younger catholic, it´s refreshing to hear this point of view simply said. I wish more would simply and boldly say this sort of thing. I´ve been astonished at the inability of people to think rationally about v2 and the conciliar church. Its like speaking to people blinded by abusive romantic relationships, “Well you just don´t really know what Bill´s like on the inside, sure he beats me, has stolen all my money, and terrorizes the kids. But that´s not really him acting, he´s really sweet on the inside. Quite frankly I´m offended you would even speak ill of him based on these things, that´s an affront to who he really is and our relationship. Please don´t bring this up again.” As a new convert you are sort like… um what is going on here!? Or worse, have I just entered some bizarre religious cult that cannot face facts?
You are on to something: perspective. A convert comes in fresh and sees things that escape the notice of the cradle-Catholics. You’ve got me thinking…
Pax.
This quote from then Cardinal Ratzinger is interesting:
Following is the translated text of an address by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, given 13 July 1988, in Santiago, Chile before that nation’s Bishops. “The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular Council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.
“This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening. That which previously was considered most holy — the form in which the liturgy was handed down — suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make question of ancient rules, or even of the great truths of the Faith — for instance, the corporal virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the immortality of the soul, etc. — nobody complains or only does so with the greatest moderation.”
Stephen I am with you. I need moral direction. I know Jesus loves me and forgives me and has an infinite amount of both for me. I need direction though. Yes, that sounds selfish with all those “I’s”, but I will pass this on to my children and other loved ones. Do I have to get all my moral direction from books or from a private meeting with my busy parrish priest? I do understand, though, that the homily is not always the place for “the bad stuff”! But then again, if never there, then where?
We can always get moral direction from the scriptures, saints, and popes, they´ll give you plenty of the bad stuff.
Marschall McLuhan has a funny quote about the Christian faith and the Second Vatican council, it goes something like “to sell 5 minutes of advertizing, news corporations have to show 25 minutes of bad news. The same holds true for the Christian faith, wherein one must recieve a lot of bad news before the good news can be recieved with profit. The council fathers seemed to forget this basic truth.”
As a counter to what I mentioned before, I do think one of my worst mistakes as a convert was bringing a protestant mentality and applying it to some of the abuses of authority I saw either in catholic parishes I was apart of or as I became familiar with catholic post-conciliar history. By this I mean, I chose to complain rather than humbly to realize my place as a neophite layperson and, be silent, seek to honor priests and the priesthood whenever I can, and pray intensely for better leadership. There´s a great story about St. Francis being brought to reprimand a fornicator priest by a bunch of angry locals, and rather than rebuke him he knelt before him and kissed both of his hands. The wayward priest immediately repented of his sins. Lay people hasten the destruction of the Church if they use abuses as an excuse to dishonor legitimate authority itself. The riddle we all confront concerning v2 is that the pastoral escape hatch seems too simple and to overlook the fact that new things were more or less proclaimed (is the church being “like an 8th sacrament” a new dogma? or just a new pastoral insight with a shelf life? i cannot tell.), even if it was in wandering essay rather than propositional “anathema sit” form. Christ in Matt 23 has a weird admonition for his followers. He says obey what the pharasees tell you, because they have “sitten on the seat of Moses” but don´t obey what they do, because they don´t do what they say. I have never excactly grasped this riddle, but I think it´s relevant about how to heal problems of abused authority, you obey but do not imitate. This is such a hard teaching for me. I liked this post originaly because it was said without a spirit of resentment or anger, which is rare and probably why one becomes a monk, to learn to be able to do such things.
i also love your optimism about a council to correct this in our lifetime! that is encouraging!
A great feeling of joy and thankfulness to God accompanied my reading of this truthful obituary of Vatican II, perhaps the most catastrophic event in the history of the Church where the goal of the subversive element at the Council was to undermine the doctrine of the Church via a contradictory “pastoral” strategy of soft-pedaling the practice of the faith. Hopefully, good progress will be made to reclaim our Traditional faith and the practice that goes with it.