Hello,
Recently, I have seen an increase in posts/blogs about how the teachings of Vatican II are supposedly evil and go against the catholic faith. Now, while these articles and discussions usually express a lot of emotion over the matter, they do not actually seem to explain why they think it is bad other than the fact that it is just ‘different’.
Can someone hear explain it to me or point me to an article that can explain it?
Some people think that Vatican II got it wrong usually because of one or more of the following reasons:
a) The intellectual current that enabled the Council to happen
b) The decline of Catholicism in the Western World after the Council happened
c) The supposed ambiguity of the Council documents
d) The collapse of Neo-Scholasticism after the Council
e) The groundwork was laid that made it possible for the Ordinary Form of the Mass to come into existence
More than likely it is a combination of the above, often combined with conspiracy theories.
A brief refutation of the above would be:
a) The
nouvelle theologie was, despite Neo-Scholastic objections, a theological movement that desired a renewed interest in the Church Fathers and the Bible. Leaders of the New Theology thought that this was needed to renew the Church and stop the growth of modernism within the Church. Authoritarian statements against the modern world would do nothing but isolate the Church from the modern man, and the “Thomism” was in reality a pseudo-Thomism that lacked the true substance of Aquinas, according to the leaders of the new theology.
b) The decline of Catholicism after the Council was the result of the Church being inaccessible to modern man for the previous 50 years, combined with the outbreak of Marxism 3 years after the Council ended. Mass attendance was already at numbers astonishingly low in countries such as Germany and France.
c) The Council wanted to serve as a starting point for a renewal leading into the future, not to be some source that would stifle all theological inquiry in the future. Combined with the fact that there were multiple theological positions at the Council which made it hard to find a consensus about what to put in the documents.
d) This was merely the result of artificially propping up a pseudo-Thomism using authority instead of letting authentic Thomism stand on its own. When a legitimate revival of St. Thomas Aquinas started by Pope Leo XIII became sterile, it decided to imitate the structure of Aquinas but left out much of the substance. By resting on claims to authority, it was only a matter of time before the remains of a once good Neo-Scholasticism came crashing down.
e) These people blame the OF for many of the world’s problems and must come up with conspiracy theories to support this claim. In reality, despite many abuses currently in the Mass, the OF recovers much lost from the Early Church that wasn’t in the Tridentine Mass.
