Thirty-seven years after the end of the only church council of the 20th century, the jury has come in with its verdict: Vatican II appears to have been an unrelieved disaster for Roman Catholicism.
Who is the "jury"? According to Buchanan, it’s Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis, who has "pulled together a slim volume of statistics he has titled Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II." As all you math majors know, the numbers simply don't lie:
His [Jones] findings make prophets of Catholic traditionalists who warned that Vatican II would prove a blunder of historic dimensions, and those same findings expose as foolish and naive those who believed a council could reconcile Catholicism and modernity. When Pope John XXIII threw open the windows of the church, all the poisonous vapors of modernity entered, along with the Devil himself.
I don’t know which Vatican II Mr. Buchanan is talking about, but it doesn’t sound like the one whose documents I’ve read, the one praised by Pope John Paul II, and the one that really, in so many ways, has not even been implemented yet. I wonder if Mr. Buchanan would say the Holy Spirit "blundered" in bringing about Vatican II. If so, can we surmise that Mr. Buchanan is no longer a loyal Catholic?
Regardless, portraying Vatican II as an attempted reconciliation of Catholicism and modernity is ridiculous and is historical revisionism equal to that attempted by those on the "left" who have sought to use the Council to sell the Church out to secularism, indifferentism, and Catholic-Lite (to borrow George Weigel’s apt phrase). Yes, Vatican II certainly addressed the relationship between the Church and the modern world, but opening the doors to a dialogue of truth is far different from what Mr. Buchanan describes. In fact, he describes what dissenting theologians and laity have attempted to do with the Council, as when they refer to the amorphous "spirit of Vatican II." The spirit of the Council, as Cardinal Ratzinger has noted, was the Holy Spirit, and that spirit is found in full strength in the documents produced by the Council Fathers.
Sadly, so many good Catholics today are drawn to the angry, reactionary, and pessimistic view of the Church that folks such as Mr. Buchanan proclaim. Many have bought into the idea that the Catholic Church in the U.S. was in tip-top shape prior to Vatican II, which only begs the question, "Why did so many loyal Catholics fall away so quickly?" In fact, some older Catholics I have spoken to over the years acknowledge that the problems which finally erupted in the late 60s and early 70s were in existence long before Vatican II. After all, why is post-Vatican II Catholicism thriving in other parts of the world, especially in sections of Asia and Africa? The Council did not fail, but many Catholics in the U.S. certainly did.
Combining nostalgia, anger, and a pile of statistics is not a good way to properly gauge what the Council sought to do, and is still seeking to do. This is why our Holy Father and Cardinal Ratzinger continue to urge Catholics to read the documents of the Council, to truly examine what was written and said under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Council was not Satanic or a disaster, but a great moment in the history of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, that continues today, even as the evils and confusions propagated in the name of Vatican II hold sway in various parts of the American Church. Mr. Buchanan would do well to figure out what really happened forty years ago and what the actual roots of today's problems are.
