How does one respond to the traditionalist claim that Vatican II served to get non-Catholics and non-Christians into the Church by deliberately making the council’s documents ambiguous, thus making the Church seem more appealing?
You respond by taking a trick out of Rush Limbaugh’s playbook and you just laugh at them. The argument is absurd and it exposes like a pink elephant the intellectual ineptitude of the person making the argument. Just because a person does not understand something does not mean that it is wrong.
First I would ask how ambigious documents make a Church appealing.
Second, I would ask: WHAT ambigious documents? I’ve never read any VII document that I thought was particularly ambigious, and nobody has ever given me an example of one.
The many abuses that have happened “in the spirit of Vatican II” are not supported by ambiguity in the Council resolutions (nor to the proponents of those abuses cite “ambigious” documents to support themselves - have you ever seen an actual VII *citation *from the lirturgical or doctrinal abuse crowd?).
But, of course, any document of substance will naturally contain at least some level of ambiguity. Take, for example, the Bible…