I reject the sanitized, sugar-coated teachings of the church, most of which largely originated with VII – especially the platitudes and ignorance that infest Catholic schools.
When I read the
documents nowadays, I don’t find them to be sanitized or sugar coated. When I used to read my kids’ religion texts a few decades ago, I
did find
them to be worthless in many cases. I tried my best to communicate to my kids the doctrinal content that was systematically eliminated
after VII, not a
result of VII. The same could be said about my diocesan newspaper, or many sermons taken from the daily newspaper editorials.
Other than the document on liturgy, most of the documents simply described changes already in progress in the 1960s. The decree on Laity reflects the more active role some laity had been playing in the decades leading up to the council. The decrees on Religious Life, Social Communications, Education, reflect where the Church, and/or society, was already moving.
One might complain that the documents focused too much on “here’s where we have come since WWI” and failed to predict what was coming soon after. But then hardly anyone else predicted the massive impact of the Internet, pornography, breakdown of marriage, gay “marriage”, abortion, and the astonishing passivity of Catholics in the face of those evils.
The Documents never predicted the attack on Reason in secular society, or the attack on doctrine from many inside the Church. The documents never predicted the extreme concentration of power in the media, almost all of which is anti-Christian. But nobody else predicted it either.
So it is a waste of time to criticize the Council for what happened afterwards. The Council documents are mildly useful today as an outline. But our attention should be on addressing the issues of 2018. Every minute spent attacking Vatican II is a minute taken away from finding solutions to 2018.