Vatican II was a product of a small fraction of the clergy and imposed by force majeure from the top down. It is sometimes described as a pastoral council. It was an anti-pastoral council where the faithful were treated as so many liturgical lab rats, because the besetting sin of a significant fraction of the clergy, along with love of money and sodomy, is boredom and the ceaseless search for novelty to relieve their boredom.
This time around, it will be a force up – assuming you only invite like minded people who speak synodality. A show. A charade that the “church” speaks.
I need to go pray.
We we make it through, someone remember that I’m for jailing sex offending clergy and not promoting them to Rome
I find it interesting that those who both credit and blame Vatican II for what took place in the Church in the late sixties never cite the texts of the Council to make their case.
“It was an anti-pastoral council where the faithful were treated as so many liturgical lab rats,…”
I get the idea, yet…that first part strikes me as a bit…severe. Though certainly the second part has been accurate enough.
I had heard lots about what Vatican II did or did not say. By 28, in a fit of pique, I began investigating the Council to learn for myself; I’d grown weary of contradicting claims. Imagine my displeasure at learning the Council Fathers wrote 16 documents, yet 6 years of Catholic high school had not examined even one! GRRRRR!!!!!!
From my reading, the Fathers sought both maintaining the faith as received, yet to interpret and/or present faith in new ways. We assumed that “modern” man viewed the world differently from medievals. True partly, yet not in the manner we thought. Realizing that modern and medieval man had roughly the same nature …created several other problems.
Not the least of those: Explaining why modern man had need–or want–to present or live the faith differently from before.
I wouldn’t say the Council was anti-pastoral; I think rather that “pastoral” wasn’t well defined, it wasn’t…restrained..to maintain a coherent picture. Thus, instead organic change, “experiments” happened within the Mass. Nobody took any serious polls, people simply DID things, whether anyone wanted them or not.
sigh I keep hoping that Francis will recognize that restricting the traditional Mass…isn’t working. ..I keep hoping he’ll be clear about SSPX being in or out. Present matter of six of one and half-dozen of the other don’t help.
..I ordinarily wouldn’t care a whit about a particular group, yet counting parish or chapel locations shows the SSPX outnumbers other traditional groups by roughly 2-3 to 1.
Of course, even with them, traditionalist parishes in the US are outnumbered by about 34 to 1.
What a mess!
The Force is strong in this one.
The fact that the council documents can support or defend both adherents or opponents to the implementation of the council is indicative of how poorly the council concluded its work. The best analogy I can ascribe to the whole thing is it’s automotive stablemate, the Edsel. Born of the same rocket age optimism it was completely misaligned to the target audience by the time it was launched. The Church has been trying to update and convince the world to accept their liturgical Edsel ever since.
@John Flaherty: if your study did not include the book Iota Unum by Romano Amerio, may I respectfully suggest it is not yet complete? Please do read that book if you haven’t already. Vatican II was a terminal symptom, not the cause, of what primarily ails the institutional Church. That is, the sin of Modernism, which as you probably know was called “the synthesis of all heresies” by Pope St. Pius X. God bless.
Regarding the Latin Liturgy, I will remind everyone that the first Eucharist was in Aramaic, and the first regular practice of the Mass was in the Koine Greek of the New Testament. A Latin liturgy was developed and the Scriptures translated into Latin because that was the common (vulgar) language of the Western Church.
Now all that said, I have been to Latin Mass (here in Charlotte, NC) and it is like Heaven on Earth. I have gotten that same feeling at a Mass in an Anglican Ordinariate Church (down in the Dallas – Fort Worth area) and an Orthodox Anglican Church (here in Charlotte, NC) where the Liturgy is in Elizabethan English and the priest faces the altar. Additionally, I have gotten that feeling when I attended a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (in Syracuse, NY) where the Mass was in Old Church Slavonic (which I understand not at all). And I have seen videos of Russian and Greek Orthodox Divine Liturgies –> beautiful, absolutely beautiful (now don’t go off on corrupt Partriach Kirill because we got our own Marxist Peronist Caudillo to deal with). It isn’t the language, Folks. It’s the reverence, the holiness, the worship of God Almighty to whom the sacrifice of His divine Son is being offered for the sins of the world. Vatican II’s Novus Ordo thows cold water on all of that.
PS, if I had my way, you’d all be learning Latin and Koine Greek. That’s what my old man made me learn when I was a teenager. I hated it at the time. I now regard him as a saint despite the fact that he was Pentecostal till the day of his death.
The new liturgy produced by Bugnini’s cadre of like-minded ideologues was intended as spiritual shock treatment and it was foreseen it would alienate. Paul VI admitted as much.
https://archive.ccwatershed.org/media/pdfs/13/10/14/09-56-20_0.pdf#:~:text=PAUL%20VI%2C%20Address%20to%20a%20general~%20audience%2C%20on,Sunday%2C%2030%20November%2C%20the%20First%20Sunday%20of%20Advent.
They burned the village to save it, and hate hate hate anyone who laments the loss.
And speaking of Vatican II…
The synods since 2013 are a slow-motion Vatican III. The progs will finally have their dream council, and they’ll jackboot it down everyone’s throats.
It’s ironic that John XXIII, the Pope who opened the Pandora’s box of Vatican II, simultaneously issued the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia. In it, that Pope outlined the reasons why Latin had become the primary language of the Roman Rite Church. He defended its position as the primary liturgical language, reiterated the Church’s insistence that clergy become fluent, and outlined a detailed program for its instruction.
That Apostolic Constitution was never abrogated, it was simply ignored in the following tsunami that was Vatican II. Technically, it is still in force— although no one refers to it, and certainly no one follows the law it lays down.
(And by the way, Frank— your recommendation of Iota Unum is spot-on.)
Good Afternoon, Everyone,
Frank, BillR, I haven’t read the book, yet I’ve come across the general gist over time. Vatican II didn’t so much create the problem as it provided what military people call a “target of opportunity”. It was just precise enough to not allow bald modernism, yet just vague enough to allow the camel’s nose under the tent flap. …And we can argue another time whether that was incidental or intentional….
Lucius, I think you’re correct. I’ve been to Mass in 6 languages and 3 rites. I considered a 4th rite from sheer frustration; I ultimately decided not because …the parking lot for the Ukrainian church was VERY small. Yet I’ve been to reverent Mass in the TLM, the Byzantine Rite, and yes, even the Novus Ordo. I found one of very few reverent Masses for the last a few months before Summorum Pontificum.
It can be done. Sadly, it mostly is not.
Too much of the Church tends to be fussed over “outreach”, though precisely whom they aim to reach is usually quite muddy. Often contradictory.
Practice of Mass tends to follow suit.
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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” —Pascal
@John Flaherty, thanks for the reply. We are on the same page.