Solitudinem Faciunt, Pacem Appellant

We live at an exciting and demanding time when the vision of the Second Vatican Council is beginning to be realized in the Church

Today also marks forty years since the Second Vatican Council ended – forty ruinous years for the Western Church. The Council was followed by a great disaster after its implementation. Nowhere do the fruits of Vatican II show real growth. How is it that in a couple of decades the Catholic Church has plummeted from the courageous intellectual and spiritual giants of the pre-Vatican II days to the present cartel of bog-standard Modernists?

The answer is surprisingly simple.

“…any council called to make drastic change in the Church is beforehand decreed to be void and annulled” – Pope Pius II, Execrabilis

It is shocking enough to realise that errors were possible in the documents of Vatican II. We now ask: are errors there? Does Vatican II contradict the teachings of the Church? Let us see:

On modernity:
"It is not fitting that the Church of God be changed according to the fluctuations of worldly necessity." – Pope Pius VI, Quod Aliquantum, March 10, 1791

"...the Church... can and ought to be enriched by the development of human social life... so that she may... adjust it [the Constitution of the Church] more successfully to our times." – Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, #44

"No man can serve two masters, for to please one amounts to contemning the other... It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men." – Pope Leo XIII, Sappientiæ Christianæ, #6 & 7, Jan. 10, 1890

"Christians cannot yearn for anything more ardently than to serve the men of the modern world." – Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, #93

On religious liberty:
"They do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, especially fatal to the Catholic Church and to the salvation of souls... namely that liberty of conscience and of worship is a right proper to every man, and should be proclaimed and asserted by law in every correctly established society”– Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, #3, Dec. 8, 1864

"The human person has the right to religious freedom... this right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed. Thus it is to become a civil right." – Vatican II Declaration on Religious Freedom, #2

Judge a tree by its fruits (Matthew 7:15 – 20):
Mass attendance has plummeted 66% in France, 54% in Holland, 50% in Italy and 40% in the USA.

Infant baptisms are down 50%, adult conversions 75%, while divorce rates among Catholics, along with birth control, have reached shocking proportions.

Seminaries are being emptied (e.g. seminary enrolment in France declined by 83% from 1963 to 1973).

(Source: New Jersey Catholic News, Summer)

The liturgy in many parishes is today more akin to a teddy bears’ picnic organised by Ronald McDonald than anything one could truly describe as Holy Mass. “Instead of worshipping God Almighty, we now worship God All Matey”, as one commentator put it so subtly.

Converts to the faith are down 70%! Put another way: for every ten people who found conversion to the faith attractive prior to Vatican II, only three do today. But even that is not the end of this miserable story, because many converts these days don't in actual fact become Catholics – i.e. Charismatic Catholics.

Many beautiful and cherished churches have either been closed or turned into ugly, unloved relativist worship spaces.

“...the Church finds herself in a time of uncertainty, of self-criticism, and even self-destruction. It is like an internal upheaval... as if the Church were striking blows to herself” – Pope Paul VI lamented the disastrous results of Vatican II

What have these reforms created? They did not create a renewal of the Catholic Church, that I assure you. This Council was the primary reason why I did not choose to become Catholic shortly after my exodus from fundamentalist Presbyterianism.