I copy this from the Deacon’s Bench, press “read more” or the title for his complete article and a bit of a rebuttal:
‘THE COUNCIL WAS A FAILURE’
That’s one of the bold conclusions drawn by Ross Douthat in today’s New York Times.
Just because a moment calls for reinvention doesn’t mean that a specific set of reinventions will succeed, and we now have decades of data to justify a second encapsulating statement: The council was a failure.
This isn’t a truculent or reactionary analysis. The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike — but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest.
The new liturgy was supposed to make the faithful more engaged with the Mass; instead, the faithful began sleeping in on Sunday and giving up Catholicism for Lent. The church lost much of Europe to secularism and much of Latin America to Pentecostalism — very different contexts and challengers, yet strikingly similar results.
And if anything post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed with its endless right-versus-left battles, and to the extent it engaged with the secular world it was in paltry imitation — via middling guitar music, or political theories that were just dressed up versions of left-wing or right-wing partisanship, or ugly modern churches that were outdated 10 years after they were built and empty soon thereafter.
There is no clever rationalization, no intellectual schematic, no sententious Vatican propaganda — a typical recent document references “the life-giving sustenance provided by the council,” as though it were the eucharist itself — that can evade this cold reality.
3 comments:
After quoting Douthat, the Deacon observes, "The Holy Spirit is at work. I see it repeatedly in my own little chapter of this big story," and goes on to praise the establishment of Permanent Deacons.
O.K..
I'll give this much...God allowed Vatican II to happen. He's currently permitting us to live under a hemorrhaging disaster of a papacy and has permitted us to lose millions of faithful as a result of the Council. If nothing else, maybe it's God's way of weeding out who His followers are and who they are not--I honestly don't know. I don't purport to know the will of God. But it doesn't take a genius to see that the Council was hardly a success. I maintain it was something else altogether and the forces behind it were neither benevolent or divine.
I've said it here. I'm passing out pamphlets on the street about it. So can we dispense with blaming Traditionalists for observing the obvious?
I meant to say, I'm NOT passing out pamphlets on the street.
Oops.
To the very end of their rule the various Soviet and satellite Communist Parties asserted the wisdom and rightness of their way of governing. Then came the collapse. Hubris. That is all that keeps them talking. Gaslighting is another good descriptor for what is emanating from the synodal crisis. "Synodalism": is an ideologically inspired enterprise. Unfortunately, it may be followed by Synod 2 in a few years ostensibly to correct and update Synod 1? The sequel to the Spirit of Vatican 2.
It is hard no to become totally cynical.
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