Working as intended. Or rather, councils are not static documents that are self-authenticating, but are interpreted by those who implement them. And the debate was how radical that departure was meant to be, not whether or not there should be a departure.
The problem was none of these people read history about revolutions, and how revolutions may start when you like, but do not end where you will.
True but as the bishop attested it seems a more moderate interpretation is beginning to emerge as the “norm”. Sure there are those who reject the council (rad-trads) and those who want to ossify 1970’s theology and liturgy. However, it is not the immediate reception of the council that is only legitimate interpretation of the council that usually is accepted. If one looks at the council of Trent it took about 50-100 years after the council until many of its reforms were accepted and implemented (seminaries and liturgies as tangible markers). My guess is we are beginning to experience the real reform of Vatican II. Especially since so many cultural changes followed the Council which probably furthered obscured it’s true reforms.
I think it is quite debateable that there were dramatic differences in interpretation in the Council of Trent in everything. There certainly were points of theology that were not settled, but there really wasn't a major dispute over what the Council decided, in the way that nobody can really say, after 60 years, what Vatican II actually means on a particular subject beyond "it would be nice if Chrisitans did this." All Councils take time to be implemented as culture takes root, non compliance is dealt with, etc. Yet what parts are "non-compliant" with regard to Vatican II? Nobody knows, and the definition has changed radically based on who is pope, or how much power he has. Francis for example views it a dogma of the Council that all Catholics in the Roman Rite must worship exactly the same. Neither JPII nor Benedict believed this, and the majority of the faithful and bishops don't either, so it is left unfulfilled. (Rightly so, as its a terrible idea.)
I'm not sure its so much a rejection of the Council or the true interpretation of it, so much as it is the Church is moving past Vatican II. On things where it offered clear insight (such as the approach towards anti-semitism, universal call to holiness, etc) that stuff is taken and embraced. A lot of it (on ecumenism, Gaudium et Spes) is pretty horribly dated in 2025, but not heretical, so a different path was chosen, and newer initiatives learn from its mistakes. once you accept that Vatican II was implemented and is a past event, you can take stock of what actually worked, what didn't, and change as needed.
So long as the Church obsessed over Vatican II as a present event, she couldn't. Instead, Father Time did the work instead.
I mean, I guess…but there was also the difference in the difficulty of travel and limited social communication meant debate was less out there. Each bishop went to his own home and did as he pleased with less public exposure. Without seminaries priests were less attuned and educated, meaning they were not participating in public discourse. The laity were still mostly illiterate, so it is hard to for them to debate the principles of Church documents they can’t read. So yeah, there was less debate after the council. But it took twenty years of debate and Pius V having to do a lot of politicking to get the different canons and documents approved. And if you look at the inter-Catholic debates surrounding grace and free will (Jansenism, which preceded Bishop Jansen in Church thought), different thoughts on the inculturation of the Gospel in missionary settings, and a host of other ideas that were of hot debate in Catholic circles. I think your argument that there was no debate about topics covered by Trent is not supported by the evidence.
After the council despite the fact that it called for seminaries to be formed St. Charles Borromeo was one of the few that actually did so. Most bishops of the time thought it was a silly idea and only subsequent generations of the heiarchy began to implement the reform which would form the Church down to our day.
This was great! I would love to see interviews with more people who lived through the conciliar and post-conciliar changes. Helps me to better understand where we are now.
Going to continue to pray for the good bishop and the Church in the Netherlands. There is always hope!
"The Ratzinger Report", his interviews with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori from back in the 1980s is always an interesting read -- about what he found when he returned to the world of academia in Germany after the Council.
I was a young teenager during Vatican II and wasn’t paying much attention, but I remember my mother being very upset by the abrupt changes in the Liturgy, like ditching Latin, and the elimination of some traditional practices, for instance, during Lent. It did feel like, practically overnight, we were in a different church. I wasn’t very sympathetic to my mother’s angst, but I am now. I can understand how difficult these changes were for the older generations, who were not treated with any sensitivity. Yet they carried on and did not leave the Church, bless them!
There's a certain way of thinking about all this that can't be right: The Church was in fantastic shape, and then all of a sudden, Vatican II came along and messed it up.
That can't be right, for at least two reasons: (1) The people who planned and carried out Vatican II were themselves all products of the pre-conciliar Church; (2) if everything before the Council was healthy, then it wouldn't have fallen to pieces so easily.
If one says, "It wasn't the Council, it was how the Council was implemented," then the same problem just reappears: Where did all these people come from who distorted the Council? They must have already been there, with all their years of pre-Conciliar formation.
So things were going badly before the Council, it seems clear. But in what ways? My guess is that, before the Council, the harsh and rigid things that we always hear about really were happening, but also, wild overreactions were at least being envisioned.
But what did it look like in detail? And how did it come to pass that the wild overreactions prevailed for so long? Presumably the answer will be different from place to place.
Anyway, I hope historians have been interviewing all the people who were the key players at the time.....
And they were not just “already there.” They were in positions of leadership in the Council, in the Curia, in national bishop conferences, and in dioceses and parishes throughout the world.
Vatican II is not what exposed the Church to the errors of modernism. If anything, I would argue that the way the Council was misinterpreted so quickly, so readily, and so consistently reveals just how pervasive modernism already was in the Church.
Perhaps. I recently wrote an essay that was actually inspired by an episode of The Pillar Podcast from a few months ago. Mr. Condon offered a remark about the spirit of the age taking over the implementation of a major council. I think he was spot-on; the over-reactions to Vatican II can be understood anthropologically in light of the zeitgeist at the time of the Council.
In your view, does "the spirit of the age taking over" the implementation mean that a) this spirit was already present in a critical mass of the Church at the time of the Council, b) this spirit was not present, but was able to enter or influence the Church in the course of implementing the Council, or c) something else?
Something else, I think. By “spirit” I do not mean the Holy Spirit, but rather something more like the zeitgeist of the people who influenced the immediate implementation of the council. Remember, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Anglo-European consensus was something like Popper’s open society. The anthropology that derives from that also directed a lot of the church’s reforms, especially around liturgy. But the fruits of the Holy Spirit are manifest over much longer time horizons. Which is why, if you had to force me to take a side, I would probably align with Pope Benedict‘s version of the reform of the reform.
The similar question I wonder idly about is why the pre-Conciliar order generally proved so fragile when V2 hit. It seems there were a lot of highly motivated clerics in positions of authority who really moved against it—and succeeded wildly, if not completely. We talk about “modernism” as if it’s a coherent ideology, but it seems to me the widespread nature of it across the Church may make it more akin to a Zeitgeist, as you posit. Perhaps the traumas of two world wars in a generation and a half were felt to be self-discrediting by a lot of churchmen? I dunno. But even assuming the existence of a group of partisan zealots (like Schilebeeckx), the real speed and extent of the collapse (?) or surrender (?) suggests that behind the full pews and social richness, there was some sort of deep rot in the Church going back into mid-century (or further). I’ve never seen this satisfactorily explained without resort to conspiracy theories or tendentious-seeming political analysis.
I do think there's an answer that makes sense, historically, that doesn't presuppose institutional rot.
Remember, the Liturgy Movement had been active for a century before the Council. We laud Pope St. Pius X for his improvements to the Divine Office, the Missal, and especially to the rehab of Gregorian chant, but he was simply getting ahead of an understanding that the institutional Church was so focused on "fighting modernism" (e.g., the Syllabus of Errors) and protecting the Papal States that it didn't CONTINUE the process of adapting orthopraxis to contemporary needs.
The Church must fine-tune its message and its practices to every generation. That's the point of evangelization. But 1848 changed a lot in European history, and the institution of the papacy was so focused on European politics that fine-tuning yielded to a harsh anti-modernist perspective.
People who in the 1950s and 1960s still advocated for on-the-ground evangelization are not "deep rot" -- they were witnesses for a real need. I mean, the average Mass in, say, 1950 was not as beautiful and reverent as the average Extraordinary Form Mass of 2025. There were real problems. Arguably, there were some folks who pushed too far to the Left. That's normal. But a recognition that things weren't quite right? That was a widespread belief that created such a groundswell of support for the Council.
That’s a point well taken, but the enthusiasm for and lack of successful resistance to the violent changes wrought makes me think that there was either some inherent weakness in the life of the church (say, e.g., the traditional deference to clergy and religious could be exploited to ram through changes) or some weird set of historically contingent circumstances could explain not only a reformism gone amok but the all but absolute collapse, say, of female religious life, with orders abandoning their traditional charisms for nebulous ideas of community and the like. I’m sure it’s multicausal and complex, but I’m haunted by the rapidity of the abandonment of so much self-evidently good stuff—which suggests that many at the time did not see it as good. Which is sort of what I’m getting at with the “rot” metaphor: the Church might have been relying (however understandably) too much on mere institutional inertia for self-perpetuation. Again, I don’t know. Your point that the Church seemed cognizant of having to reckon with the new European order is indisputable. Why they did so so disastrously is what ears at me.
It seems likely that there were at least two important factors: (a) problematic things happening specifically in the 1960s, largely derived from outside the Church, that somehow influenced the implementation of the council; (b) problems inside the Church but pre-dating the council, problems that made various Church structures, customs, etc. weak, and easy to topple, when radical ideas started flying around.
Concerning (b): When I hear people talk about Catholic culture before the council, I get the impression that there was a lot of ethnic Catholicism, at least in the US. Being Catholic was just part of being Irish, or being Italian, or whatever. (There might be analogues to this in European countries, but they wouldn't be quite the same, because (back then) European countries were much less multi-ethnic than the US.) Anyway, if being Catholic is paired, in one's mind, with (say) being Irish, then even marrying someone Catholic who isn't Irish might be the beginning of the end: losing one's Irishness would tend to lead to losing one's Catholicism.
If this is correct, then it's a sign of pre-conciliar weakness in (some parts of) the Church: the faith being too tied to something essentially worldly, i.e., ethnic identity.
This Bishop is a hero. God bless him for his fidelity and humility, living in such an environment for decades.
What he recounts is proof positive of what I think was the state of Catholicism during the first half of the 20th C.: an increasing frenzy of activity while dying inside. It was a bubble ready to pop, and it began imploding well before VII. The Council was needed to secure the foundations of the Church in preparation for the madness that was to sweep across the "West," like bringing in the sails when a storm is coming. VII is the only reason the masts didn't get torn off.
As a priest with a License in Sacred Theology from the former JPII Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family (Wash. D.C., 1991) I have come across other VII theologians also saying that the documents of VII were a compromised redaction to satisfy the Rahner wing and the Ottaviani wing during the Council. Read the Rhine flows into the Tiber. IMHO, the orthodoxy of the documents are found in their respective footnotes! Anyhow, I came across a newspaper journalist from the 1960’s. His name is. George Weller. He wrote out of Chicago but was syndicated and the newspaper in Watertown N.Y found in Fulton County carried his columns. I have saved several of these columns to my homepage but the person managing the site shifted the numbers. Anyhow, George Weller wrote about the crisis following VII in the Netherlands and reported about a private meeting of Bishops and Cardinals to push for a number of liberal issues e.g. Celibacy being foremost. Then Pope Paul VI sent his right hand man to intervene in this process and George Weller wrote about this in several columns. (It was right after that that Pope Paul VI’s first bishop synod to deal with Priestly Celibacy. I argue that much of his papacy was a “rear guard” action i.e. he was always putting out fires. I contacted the Fulton County News manger and he assured me that they are still available but that I had to figure it out his search engine. He wasn’t going to do it for me.
But this is perhaps one that has a broken link. If someone could figure it out, I believe you will find some unique reporting that I have not found elsewhere. Here are two others and I believe can be found by someone who knows how to use his search engine on his site.
My dear friends.......Bishop Hendriks is an eminent theologian. I am not. But that may be my advantage as it allows me to consider this in a multi-disciplinary way. This topic is missing something big and, oddly, something that shares the name of this journal.
For Dutch Catholics, the Council would seem to be a less significant event that the collapse of the Dutch system of 'Pillarization' -- the existence of rigid, distinct social groups, Catholics being one. Under Pillarization, Dutch Catholics had their own daily newspapers, radio stations, political parties, labor unions, farmers' associations, banks, stores, schools, hospitals, universities, scouting organizations and sports leagues. Such segregation meant that many people had little or no personal contact with members of other pillars.
The system had its absurdities (Protestants played soccer on Saturdays, Catholics on Sunday, and Socialists played Korfball, as form of basketball). But also, it worked while it worked. It also minimized clericalism with the large number of lay institutions that would be synodalist's dream!
But Depillarization showed that there were real underlying problems with religious faith, similar to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. I could go on, but I have probably already bored you.
He does briefly mention pillarization when he talks about Catholic Dutch institutions just not by name. But, yes, that was an important factor. I interviewed Cardinal Eijk a while ago and he explained it in greater detail.
Before continuing with the (usually) endless discussion of Conciliar doctrine vs. implementation, might I suggest that concerned Roman Catholics everywhere do a very, very deep dive into the documents and statements that Vatican II promulgated. One glaring example is Nostra Aetate, one of the most egregious and damaging elements that has led us into so much of what hurts today. Before blaming the faithful for turning away, take a hard look at the leadership of the Church, both then and more so today, read the documents in the translation of your native language, and study the available scholarship and criticisms regarding their origin and how many were "pieced together" almost in the manner of political manifestoes to satisfy everyone, but succeeding in satisfying no one. The end result has been half a century of damage to our Holy Church on a scale comparable to the Reformation.
I was a young teenager during Vatican II and wasn’t paying much attention, but I remember my mother being very upset by the abrupt changes in the Liturgy, like ditching Latin, and the elimination of some traditional practices, for instance, during Lent. It did feel like, practically overnight, we were in a different church. I wasn’t very sympathetic to my mother’s angst, but I am now. I can understand how difficult these changes were for the older generations, who were not treated with any sensitivity. Yet they carried on and did not leave the Church, bless them!
Vatican II was used as a departure....
Working as intended. Or rather, councils are not static documents that are self-authenticating, but are interpreted by those who implement them. And the debate was how radical that departure was meant to be, not whether or not there should be a departure.
The problem was none of these people read history about revolutions, and how revolutions may start when you like, but do not end where you will.
True but as the bishop attested it seems a more moderate interpretation is beginning to emerge as the “norm”. Sure there are those who reject the council (rad-trads) and those who want to ossify 1970’s theology and liturgy. However, it is not the immediate reception of the council that is only legitimate interpretation of the council that usually is accepted. If one looks at the council of Trent it took about 50-100 years after the council until many of its reforms were accepted and implemented (seminaries and liturgies as tangible markers). My guess is we are beginning to experience the real reform of Vatican II. Especially since so many cultural changes followed the Council which probably furthered obscured it’s true reforms.
I think it is quite debateable that there were dramatic differences in interpretation in the Council of Trent in everything. There certainly were points of theology that were not settled, but there really wasn't a major dispute over what the Council decided, in the way that nobody can really say, after 60 years, what Vatican II actually means on a particular subject beyond "it would be nice if Chrisitans did this." All Councils take time to be implemented as culture takes root, non compliance is dealt with, etc. Yet what parts are "non-compliant" with regard to Vatican II? Nobody knows, and the definition has changed radically based on who is pope, or how much power he has. Francis for example views it a dogma of the Council that all Catholics in the Roman Rite must worship exactly the same. Neither JPII nor Benedict believed this, and the majority of the faithful and bishops don't either, so it is left unfulfilled. (Rightly so, as its a terrible idea.)
I'm not sure its so much a rejection of the Council or the true interpretation of it, so much as it is the Church is moving past Vatican II. On things where it offered clear insight (such as the approach towards anti-semitism, universal call to holiness, etc) that stuff is taken and embraced. A lot of it (on ecumenism, Gaudium et Spes) is pretty horribly dated in 2025, but not heretical, so a different path was chosen, and newer initiatives learn from its mistakes. once you accept that Vatican II was implemented and is a past event, you can take stock of what actually worked, what didn't, and change as needed.
So long as the Church obsessed over Vatican II as a present event, she couldn't. Instead, Father Time did the work instead.
I mean, I guess…but there was also the difference in the difficulty of travel and limited social communication meant debate was less out there. Each bishop went to his own home and did as he pleased with less public exposure. Without seminaries priests were less attuned and educated, meaning they were not participating in public discourse. The laity were still mostly illiterate, so it is hard to for them to debate the principles of Church documents they can’t read. So yeah, there was less debate after the council. But it took twenty years of debate and Pius V having to do a lot of politicking to get the different canons and documents approved. And if you look at the inter-Catholic debates surrounding grace and free will (Jansenism, which preceded Bishop Jansen in Church thought), different thoughts on the inculturation of the Gospel in missionary settings, and a host of other ideas that were of hot debate in Catholic circles. I think your argument that there was no debate about topics covered by Trent is not supported by the evidence.
After the council despite the fact that it called for seminaries to be formed St. Charles Borromeo was one of the few that actually did so. Most bishops of the time thought it was a silly idea and only subsequent generations of the heiarchy began to implement the reform which would form the Church down to our day.
I would hate to have to answer for having any part in dropping mass going Catholics from 90% to 2%.
May God have mercy on them, they’re gonna need it.
This was great! I would love to see interviews with more people who lived through the conciliar and post-conciliar changes. Helps me to better understand where we are now.
Going to continue to pray for the good bishop and the Church in the Netherlands. There is always hope!
"The Ratzinger Report", his interviews with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori from back in the 1980s is always an interesting read -- about what he found when he returned to the world of academia in Germany after the Council.
I was a young teenager during Vatican II and wasn’t paying much attention, but I remember my mother being very upset by the abrupt changes in the Liturgy, like ditching Latin, and the elimination of some traditional practices, for instance, during Lent. It did feel like, practically overnight, we were in a different church. I wasn’t very sympathetic to my mother’s angst, but I am now. I can understand how difficult these changes were for the older generations, who were not treated with any sensitivity. Yet they carried on and did not leave the Church, bless them!
There's a certain way of thinking about all this that can't be right: The Church was in fantastic shape, and then all of a sudden, Vatican II came along and messed it up.
That can't be right, for at least two reasons: (1) The people who planned and carried out Vatican II were themselves all products of the pre-conciliar Church; (2) if everything before the Council was healthy, then it wouldn't have fallen to pieces so easily.
If one says, "It wasn't the Council, it was how the Council was implemented," then the same problem just reappears: Where did all these people come from who distorted the Council? They must have already been there, with all their years of pre-Conciliar formation.
So things were going badly before the Council, it seems clear. But in what ways? My guess is that, before the Council, the harsh and rigid things that we always hear about really were happening, but also, wild overreactions were at least being envisioned.
But what did it look like in detail? And how did it come to pass that the wild overreactions prevailed for so long? Presumably the answer will be different from place to place.
Anyway, I hope historians have been interviewing all the people who were the key players at the time.....
And they were not just “already there.” They were in positions of leadership in the Council, in the Curia, in national bishop conferences, and in dioceses and parishes throughout the world.
Vatican II is not what exposed the Church to the errors of modernism. If anything, I would argue that the way the Council was misinterpreted so quickly, so readily, and so consistently reveals just how pervasive modernism already was in the Church.
Perhaps. I recently wrote an essay that was actually inspired by an episode of The Pillar Podcast from a few months ago. Mr. Condon offered a remark about the spirit of the age taking over the implementation of a major council. I think he was spot-on; the over-reactions to Vatican II can be understood anthropologically in light of the zeitgeist at the time of the Council.
In your view, does "the spirit of the age taking over" the implementation mean that a) this spirit was already present in a critical mass of the Church at the time of the Council, b) this spirit was not present, but was able to enter or influence the Church in the course of implementing the Council, or c) something else?
Something else, I think. By “spirit” I do not mean the Holy Spirit, but rather something more like the zeitgeist of the people who influenced the immediate implementation of the council. Remember, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Anglo-European consensus was something like Popper’s open society. The anthropology that derives from that also directed a lot of the church’s reforms, especially around liturgy. But the fruits of the Holy Spirit are manifest over much longer time horizons. Which is why, if you had to force me to take a side, I would probably align with Pope Benedict‘s version of the reform of the reform.
The similar question I wonder idly about is why the pre-Conciliar order generally proved so fragile when V2 hit. It seems there were a lot of highly motivated clerics in positions of authority who really moved against it—and succeeded wildly, if not completely. We talk about “modernism” as if it’s a coherent ideology, but it seems to me the widespread nature of it across the Church may make it more akin to a Zeitgeist, as you posit. Perhaps the traumas of two world wars in a generation and a half were felt to be self-discrediting by a lot of churchmen? I dunno. But even assuming the existence of a group of partisan zealots (like Schilebeeckx), the real speed and extent of the collapse (?) or surrender (?) suggests that behind the full pews and social richness, there was some sort of deep rot in the Church going back into mid-century (or further). I’ve never seen this satisfactorily explained without resort to conspiracy theories or tendentious-seeming political analysis.
I do think there's an answer that makes sense, historically, that doesn't presuppose institutional rot.
Remember, the Liturgy Movement had been active for a century before the Council. We laud Pope St. Pius X for his improvements to the Divine Office, the Missal, and especially to the rehab of Gregorian chant, but he was simply getting ahead of an understanding that the institutional Church was so focused on "fighting modernism" (e.g., the Syllabus of Errors) and protecting the Papal States that it didn't CONTINUE the process of adapting orthopraxis to contemporary needs.
The Church must fine-tune its message and its practices to every generation. That's the point of evangelization. But 1848 changed a lot in European history, and the institution of the papacy was so focused on European politics that fine-tuning yielded to a harsh anti-modernist perspective.
People who in the 1950s and 1960s still advocated for on-the-ground evangelization are not "deep rot" -- they were witnesses for a real need. I mean, the average Mass in, say, 1950 was not as beautiful and reverent as the average Extraordinary Form Mass of 2025. There were real problems. Arguably, there were some folks who pushed too far to the Left. That's normal. But a recognition that things weren't quite right? That was a widespread belief that created such a groundswell of support for the Council.
That’s a point well taken, but the enthusiasm for and lack of successful resistance to the violent changes wrought makes me think that there was either some inherent weakness in the life of the church (say, e.g., the traditional deference to clergy and religious could be exploited to ram through changes) or some weird set of historically contingent circumstances could explain not only a reformism gone amok but the all but absolute collapse, say, of female religious life, with orders abandoning their traditional charisms for nebulous ideas of community and the like. I’m sure it’s multicausal and complex, but I’m haunted by the rapidity of the abandonment of so much self-evidently good stuff—which suggests that many at the time did not see it as good. Which is sort of what I’m getting at with the “rot” metaphor: the Church might have been relying (however understandably) too much on mere institutional inertia for self-perpetuation. Again, I don’t know. Your point that the Church seemed cognizant of having to reckon with the new European order is indisputable. Why they did so so disastrously is what ears at me.
This is all helpful.
It seems likely that there were at least two important factors: (a) problematic things happening specifically in the 1960s, largely derived from outside the Church, that somehow influenced the implementation of the council; (b) problems inside the Church but pre-dating the council, problems that made various Church structures, customs, etc. weak, and easy to topple, when radical ideas started flying around.
Concerning (b): When I hear people talk about Catholic culture before the council, I get the impression that there was a lot of ethnic Catholicism, at least in the US. Being Catholic was just part of being Irish, or being Italian, or whatever. (There might be analogues to this in European countries, but they wouldn't be quite the same, because (back then) European countries were much less multi-ethnic than the US.) Anyway, if being Catholic is paired, in one's mind, with (say) being Irish, then even marrying someone Catholic who isn't Irish might be the beginning of the end: losing one's Irishness would tend to lead to losing one's Catholicism.
If this is correct, then it's a sign of pre-conciliar weakness in (some parts of) the Church: the faith being too tied to something essentially worldly, i.e., ethnic identity.
Per George Weigel, then-Bp. Karol Wojtyła wrote a detailed analysis of what the Church needed, _before_ the council. I would like to read that!
The council provided the rationale for various radicals and revolutionaries to do whatever they wanted and shut down any opposition.
“[F]ast prosperity is not the most advantageous thing for your spiritual life.”
"Sing a New Church"
Summoned by the God who made us / rich in our diversity
Gathered in the name of Jesus, / richer still in unity.
Refrain: Let us bring the gifts that differ / and, in splendid, varied ways,
sing a new Church into being, / one in faith and love and praise...
Thank you for supplying today's Lenten penance.
🤣
Res ipsa loquitur: Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx OP, one of the main promoters of the Pastoral Council.
This Bishop is a hero. God bless him for his fidelity and humility, living in such an environment for decades.
What he recounts is proof positive of what I think was the state of Catholicism during the first half of the 20th C.: an increasing frenzy of activity while dying inside. It was a bubble ready to pop, and it began imploding well before VII. The Council was needed to secure the foundations of the Church in preparation for the madness that was to sweep across the "West," like bringing in the sails when a storm is coming. VII is the only reason the masts didn't get torn off.
P. Zuelke, you mind my asking how old you are?
As a priest with a License in Sacred Theology from the former JPII Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family (Wash. D.C., 1991) I have come across other VII theologians also saying that the documents of VII were a compromised redaction to satisfy the Rahner wing and the Ottaviani wing during the Council. Read the Rhine flows into the Tiber. IMHO, the orthodoxy of the documents are found in their respective footnotes! Anyhow, I came across a newspaper journalist from the 1960’s. His name is. George Weller. He wrote out of Chicago but was syndicated and the newspaper in Watertown N.Y found in Fulton County carried his columns. I have saved several of these columns to my homepage but the person managing the site shifted the numbers. Anyhow, George Weller wrote about the crisis following VII in the Netherlands and reported about a private meeting of Bishops and Cardinals to push for a number of liberal issues e.g. Celibacy being foremost. Then Pope Paul VI sent his right hand man to intervene in this process and George Weller wrote about this in several columns. (It was right after that that Pope Paul VI’s first bishop synod to deal with Priestly Celibacy. I argue that much of his papacy was a “rear guard” action i.e. he was always putting out fires. I contacted the Fulton County News manger and he assured me that they are still available but that I had to figure it out his search engine. He wasn’t going to do it for me.
For example, this link is still good.
https://fultonhistory.com/Newspapers%20Disk3/Watertown%20Times/Watertown%20NY%20Daily%20Times%201967%20Dec%20Grayscale.pdf/Watertown%20NY%20Daily%20Times%201967%20Dec%20Grayscale%20-%200203.pdf
But this is perhaps one that has a broken link. If someone could figure it out, I believe you will find some unique reporting that I have not found elsewhere. Here are two others and I believe can be found by someone who knows how to use his search engine on his site.
https://fultonhistory.com/Newspapers%20Disk3/Watertown%20Times/Watertown%20NY%20Daily%20Times%201967%20Dec%20Grayscale.pdf/Watertown%20NY%20Daily%20Times%201967%20Dec%20Grayscale%20-%200203.pdf
https://fultonhistory.com/Newspapers%20Disk3/Watertown%20Times/Watertown%20NY%20Daily%20Times%20Mar%201968%20Grayscale%20pdf/Watertown%20NY%20Daily%20Times%20Mar%201968%20Grayscale%20-%200191.pdf
This should be good.
https://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%2010/Yonkers%20NY%20Herald%20Statesman/Yonkers%20NY%20Herald%20Statesman%201963%20%20Grayscale/Yonkers%20NY%20Herald%20Statesman%201963%20%20Grayscale%20-%200169.pdf
My dear friends.......Bishop Hendriks is an eminent theologian. I am not. But that may be my advantage as it allows me to consider this in a multi-disciplinary way. This topic is missing something big and, oddly, something that shares the name of this journal.
For Dutch Catholics, the Council would seem to be a less significant event that the collapse of the Dutch system of 'Pillarization' -- the existence of rigid, distinct social groups, Catholics being one. Under Pillarization, Dutch Catholics had their own daily newspapers, radio stations, political parties, labor unions, farmers' associations, banks, stores, schools, hospitals, universities, scouting organizations and sports leagues. Such segregation meant that many people had little or no personal contact with members of other pillars.
The system had its absurdities (Protestants played soccer on Saturdays, Catholics on Sunday, and Socialists played Korfball, as form of basketball). But also, it worked while it worked. It also minimized clericalism with the large number of lay institutions that would be synodalist's dream!
But Depillarization showed that there were real underlying problems with religious faith, similar to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. I could go on, but I have probably already bored you.
He does briefly mention pillarization when he talks about Catholic Dutch institutions just not by name. But, yes, that was an important factor. I interviewed Cardinal Eijk a while ago and he explained it in greater detail.
Before continuing with the (usually) endless discussion of Conciliar doctrine vs. implementation, might I suggest that concerned Roman Catholics everywhere do a very, very deep dive into the documents and statements that Vatican II promulgated. One glaring example is Nostra Aetate, one of the most egregious and damaging elements that has led us into so much of what hurts today. Before blaming the faithful for turning away, take a hard look at the leadership of the Church, both then and more so today, read the documents in the translation of your native language, and study the available scholarship and criticisms regarding their origin and how many were "pieced together" almost in the manner of political manifestoes to satisfy everyone, but succeeding in satisfying no one. The end result has been half a century of damage to our Holy Church on a scale comparable to the Reformation.
I was a young teenager during Vatican II and wasn’t paying much attention, but I remember my mother being very upset by the abrupt changes in the Liturgy, like ditching Latin, and the elimination of some traditional practices, for instance, during Lent. It did feel like, practically overnight, we were in a different church. I wasn’t very sympathetic to my mother’s angst, but I am now. I can understand how difficult these changes were for the older generations, who were not treated with any sensitivity. Yet they carried on and did not leave the Church, bless them!