60 Years Since Vatican II

Y ears ago, during a very brief meeting at New York University with the eminent English conservative Roger Scruton, I shared with him — an Anglican by tradition — my reservations about the Second Vatican Council and my interest in the old liturgy. He had no reservation in his analysis. He said more or less that the Catholic Church had “joined in the spirit of self-hatred and suicide” that pervaded the West in the 1960s.

My reservations turned into doubts and real problems. They were echoed at the very top. “The truth is that the Vatican Council II itself has not defined any dogma and has consciously wanted to express itself in a more modest range, merely as a pastoral Council,” Pope Benedict XVI would explain. “However, many interpret it as almost a super dogma that takes away everything else.”

Sixty years ago, Evelyn Waugh wrote in National Review about his expectations and reservations regarding the Second Vatican Council, just then beginning. It is hard now to recall that a giddy ecumenical hope was one of the council’s guiding spirits. Protestant and Orthodox theologians were invited to witness the council. Waugh poured a bucket of ice on this hope:

There is no possibility of the Church’s modifying her defined doctrines to attract those to whom they are repugnant. The Orthodox Churches of the East, with whom the doctrinal differences are small and technical, are more hostile to Rome than are the Protestants. To them the sack and occupation of Constantinople for the first half of the thirteenth century — an event which does not bulk large in the historical conspectus of the West — is as lively and bitter a memory as is Hitler’s persecution to the Jews. Miracles are possible; it is presumptuous to expect them; only a miracle can reconcile the East with Rome.

This is true. The Vatican Council could not satisfy doctrinal Protestants still committed to the fundamentals of the Reformation, because the church would not — and I would hold could not — explicitly repudiate the doctrines of the Mass, the sacerdotal priesthood, her Marian dogmas, or papal supremacy. And, the church could not satisfy liberal Protestants who objected to the church’s continued intransigence on moral and sacramental issues and its hierarchical nature. Rome was against artificial birth control, divorce, and homosexuality.

What are the fruits of Vatican II? For those who pay very close attention to gossip about the Roman curia, the question is a hilarious and homophobic joke that answers itself.

But it’s worth recalling that Vatican II was billed at the time as a second Pentecost by its greatest enthusiasts. And even now, theologians describe it by borrowing the language of French communist Alain Baidou. Vatican II was an “Event” — a rupture in being that brings into light new truths and new paradigms for self-understanding. For Baidou, the great event was the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the only true philosopher was Mao Zedong. For modernist Catholics, Vatican II was the one true event, one that transformed Catholicism as it had been understood and practiced for centuries into Pharisaism and then tried to redirect Christian energies into deconstructing the old church. That is, until the subsequent popes (JP II, Benedict XVI) betrayed their revolution by insisting on doctrinal continuity.

Obviously, the greatest legacy of the council was liturgical. Its document on the liturgy seems to call for some continuity, including the retainment of Latin and Gregorian chant. But footnotes throughout envision a top-to-bottom overhaul of every physical and verbal aspect of Catholic worship, which is what we got. Some enthusiasts view this as renewal; I view it as the greatest spasm of iconoclasm in the history of Christendom.

But again, Pope Benedict XVI cut to the core problem of a new liturgy that was created by committee and imposed universally: It tended toward a church ruled by experts and a community “only celebrating itself.”

But the fact that [the liturgy] was presented as a new structure, set up against what had been formed in the course of history and was now prohibited, and that the liturgy was made to appear in some ways no longer as a living process but as a product of specialized knowledge and juridical competence, has brought with it some extremely serious damages for us.

In this way, in fact, the impression has arisen that the liturgy is “made,” that it is not something that exists before us, something “given,” but that it depends on our decisions. It follows as a consequence that this decision-making capacity is not recognized only in specialists or in a central authority, but that, in the final analysis, each “community” wants to give itself its own liturgy. But when the liturgy is something each one makes by himself, then it no longer gives us what is its true quality: encounter with the mystery which is not our product but our origin and the wellspring of our life.

And this leads me to the other astounding feature of the post–Vatican II church: the incredible proliferation of pseudo-theological jargon and relative absence of talk about Christ, and what He asks of us. The modern liturgy, it was said endlessly, has more of a “horizontal” emphasis than a “vertical” one. What did any of that mean? Was it a comment about transcendence versus communitarianism? It suggested that Catholics at Mass were now more like children on a playdate, rather than worshippers of a living God.

Catholic theologians and bishops have been turned into sponges, soaked in metaphors that have no precise theological content but which retain an acid-wash quality, an iconoclasm aimed at a church and a theology of the past that is half understood, at best. So modernists such as Hans Kung could say that Vatican II promoted a “communio model of the church” over and against an “absolutist pyramidal model.”

None of this was meant with any real conviction. It was an ad hoc theology developed for the sole purpose of legitimating dissent on moral issues touching sexuality. In Kung’s model, if the pew sitters could be shown to not be following this teaching, then the teaching itself should be jettisoned. But this has lately been junked for more papal primacy, because the current pope is seen as more progressive than some of the pew sitters.

The church has thus proceeded from slogan to slogan, as if theological reflection or — more ominously — the development of doctrine were mere rumination on the latest sets of buzzwords, usually coming from bishops or the pope. The people of God in transit, the listening church, the new evangelization, the field hospital. The synodal church. Catholics used to be known by their distinctive devotional life — prayers to the saints, rosaries, abstaining from meat on Fridays. Now, devoted Catholics spend their time reading papal encyclicals and mastering this pseudo-theological jargon.

Blah blah blah. Can we ever talk about God, sin, redemption, Our Lord and Our Lady? Heaven and hell? Oddly, it was Mike Judge who managed to capture and satirize the post–Vatican II church. Beavis turns to the crucifix and says, “I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

The priest then extinguishes his nascent faith by drowning it with modern Catholic logorrhea.

Beavis then does what most American Catholics do; he leaves.