January 1985 Print

He was wonderful. It was he who brought the Second Vatican Council to fulfilment and fruition. He implemented its decrees with remarkable insightful application and faithful interpretation. He was harried, hounded, and harassed by small-minded people who were making the fatal error of thinking that the Council had abolished the Catholic Church instead of renewing it.

Well, according to my dictionary, "renewal" involves transferring to new life, invigorating, or regenerating. It would be interesting if Cardinal Carter could tell us exactly where this renewal or regeneration is taking place—certainly not in his own country of Canada where the Catholic Church is characterized by what can only be described as an accelerating degeneration. This is true of almost every country in the western world. In every aspect of the life of the Church subject to statistical evaluation the renewal of which the Cardinal speaks exists only in the realm of fantasy. In the real world Mass attendance has decreased by percentages ranging from a modest 22% in England to 70% in France and Holland; there has been a catastrophic decline in baptisms, as much as 50% in Britain and the U.S.A. Conversions has declined by anything from 25% to 80%, while ordinations have declined by as much as 97%. To make matters worse there has been an exodus from the priestly and religious life. In the U.S.A. alone, 10,000 priests have abandoned their vocation and over 50,000 nuns have left their convents. I might add that the decline in seminary enrollment and exodus from the priesthood is much less alarming than the fact that many of those being ordained appear to have a very inadequate grasp of the Catholic Faith, which is putting it mildly!

The majority of laymen will have felt the effect of the "Spirit of Vatican II" in six main areas: the liturgy; the religious education of Catholic children; the moral teaching of the Church; the increasing political involvement of the clergy, principally on behalf of left-wing causes; ecumenism; and what I will term "democratic dialogue."

Before making a brief comment on each of these areas, I must mention once more the distinction I made earlier between the Council itself and the Council as an event. The abuses, abominations, and imbecilities which now proliferate throughout the Church can rarely be justified by citing a direct instruction of the Council. They originated rather in the ubiquitous "Spirit" of the Council which emanated from the Council as an event, but those who complain about any post-conciliar aberration will be condemned for opposing the Second Vatican Council by the priest, bishop or religious sister perpetrating the abuse; yet in many cases these abuses are diametrically opposed to what the Council actually ordered.

The outrages which scandalize the faithful were not envisaged, let alone mandated, by the bishops who voted for the Council document on the liturgy. In some cases they were initiated by the zealots who took control of the Commissions set up to implement the Council after the bishops had returned to the dioceses. The late Archbishop R. J. Dwyer of Portland, Oregon, the most cultured and erudite American bishop of the post-war era, considered that the greatest mistake of the Council Fathers was to allow the implementation of the Council to fall into the hands of these men, taken in the main from the ranks of the periti. God forbid that the interpretation of the Council should ever fall into the hands of these men, England's Cardinal Heenan had warned. But this is precisely what happened. Other abuses were initiated by rebellious priests, and rather than discipline them the Vatican eventually capitulated and legalized their rebellion. Communion in the hand provides such an example. As every student of history knows, surrendering to the demands of rebels never brings about an end to the rebellion, it simply prompts further demands. In 1980 I had a long discussion with Cardinal Seper who was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department responsible for doctrinal orthodoxy. He admitted to me that the Pope no longer exercised effective control over the bishops in the U.S.A. A good number of American dioceses are now, to all intents and purposes, autonomous Modernist enclaves where the only crime is to be loyal to the Pope or to Tradition.

1. Liturgical Abuses

But to return to the subject of the liturgy, Father Louis Bouyer, whom I have already cited, claims that there is practically no liturgy worthy of the name in the Catholic Church today, and that what has been imposed upon us in the name of the Council represents, in fact, a contradiction of what the Fathers of the Council and the great figures of the Liturgical Movement desired. The Council authorized no more than a moderate liturgical reform which no reasonable person would have opposed. It stated that all lawfully acknowledged liturgical rites were to be preserved and fostered in every way, and that there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly required them. But what has happened? Let Father Joseph Gelineau tell us. Father Gelineau was a peritus at the Council and he has been in the vanguard of the elite corps of liturgical commisars which has been imposing liturgical changes on us since it ended. Father Gelineau is, however, an honest commissar. He makes no secret of what has happened since the Council; and I quote:

To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.

The rite of Mass as you knew it until the post-conciliar revolution began in 1965 was the culmination of a gradual and natural development under the influence of the Holy Ghost which lasted for fifteen hundred years. By the year of Our Lord 1570, it had reached a near perfection as anything upon this earth can ever be. Father Faber described it as "the most beautiful thing this side of heaven." In the year 1570, Pope St. Pius V codified the Roman Rite of the Mass as it then existed forever. No priest, he said, could ever be forced to say any other form of Mass. Vatican II ordered that all lawfully acknowledged rites should be preserved and fostered in every way. That is what the Council ordered. Father Gelineau boasts that the Roman Rite has been destroyed. That is what has happened.

There are two categories of people whose views are listened to with the greatest respect by Catholic bishops today: Protestants and sociologists. Well, here is the testimony of a man who is a Protestant and a sociologist. Professor Peter L. Berger is a Lutheran professor of sociology. In a lecture delivered at the Harvard Club in New York on 11 May 1978, he commented upon the changes in our liturgy from the dispassionate standpoint of a professional sociologist. He remarked that if a thoroughly malicious member of his own profession, bent on injuring the Catholic community as much as possible, had been an adviser to the Church, he could hardly have done a better job.

Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand, probably the greatest Catholic philosopher and lay theologian in the English-speaking world this century, made an almost identical remark: "Truly," he said, "if one of the devils in C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy he could not have done it better."

Malcolm Muggeridge is one of the most distinguished converts received into the Church since the Council. He held back from this step for many years largely due to the crazy antics of so many Catholic clerics. He made the mistake of confusing the Church itself with individual churchmen. He told me in a long interview I had with him last year that he now recognizes this was a mistake, but that he still holds to an opinion he expressed before his conversion, that if our bishops stationed men with ships outside our churches to keep people away they could not be doing a more effective job.

I have cited these three men because they are not ignorant, they are not illiterate; their opinions cannot be dismissed as of no consequence as are those of us of lesser intellectual stature who dare to suggest that the new clothes worn by the Emperor of the great conciliar renewal do not exist, that the alleged renewal is no more than a delusion concocted by those in authority who dare not face up to the fact of a disintegrating Church.

 

2. Irreligious Education

The second way in which many Catholic laymen have been affected by the spirit of the Council concerns the education of their children. In place of the Catholic Faith bequeathed to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ, and which He commanded His Church to teach, we are gradually seeing a mish-mash of philanthropy and sociology. Many of the defective texts used today are clearly the progeny of the notorious Dutch Catechism which was published in 1967, within only two years of the closing of Vatican II. The state of the Church in Holland has now degenerated to the extent that being an orthodox Catholic there is akin to being a Catholic in England in penal times. Professor van der Ploeg, one of Europe's most outstanding Biblical scholars, assessed the Catechism as follows:

The Dutch Catechism is, from one end to the other, a manual of Modernism for which it aims to win an acceptance everywhere. In order not to alarm its readers the true import of its teaching is frequently concealed by deceptive and ambiguous phrasing, although at times the authors have the insolence to flaunt it openly. The Dutch Catechism has already caused incalculable harm throughout the world, as a Roman Cardinal confided to me recently.

Modern catechetics is theologically corrupt and spiritually bankrupt. Its strictures and innovations are irrelevant and unmeaningful for Catholic Faith, and can achieve nothing but its gradual dilution. The authentic renewal of catechesis will come not from them but from the faithful.