What do you think the state of the Church would be if there was no Second Vatican Council?

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If VI had not been interrupted, Italy would not have come into existence. An intransigent Church would have led to a spanish civil war like war in Italy. That would have set off the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire a little earlier, ultimately pushing the whole world to soviet style oppression.

Without V2, Europe would not have recovered from WW2. The Red brigade and other terrorist groups in Europe would have proliferated. Polish opposition to communism would have faltered under an intransigent Vatican. Totalitarian governments would proliferate and clash violently as they had in the earlier World Wars.

The Church would be locked into the impossible position of defending traditional power structures, and lost all support from people who could imagine alternatives… it would wither and die.
 
RandomAlias said:
As I read it, the question was remarkably neutral, as if the Church could be either better off or worse off, by either a little or a lot, or just breaking even.
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I fully agree. The question is carefully worded to give everyone a free choice. However, I didn’t post an answer to the OP’s question, for two reasons. First, I think I read one or two of the documents, but it was so long ago I don’t even remember which ones. Nostra Aetate was one, but after all this time I can’t be sure I read it all the way through. But the second and more important reason is that I have learned the hard way never to answer hypothetical questions.
 
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Onthisrock84 said:
Just curious on how you think the Church would look. Would it be in worse shape or better? Just hypothetically speaking.
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The Church would have changed dramatically regardless of whether V2 occurred or not.

And the changes would have been different in different parts of the globe. The Church is on all of the inhabited continents and almost every country.

Here in the United States, the Council came at a time when the majority of Catholic immigrants that came over during the industrial boom of the early 20th Century were dying off and most Catholics were people born in America. I don’t know if the Latin Mass would have kept more people involved or not. The people I knew as well as the adults seem ready to me (I was a kid) to have English Mass.
 
Separate the Council docs, the council itsel from the whole “implentation of the spirit of Vatican 2”, which was 50 percent faulty. After the council, anyone who had an agenda put it into “if you don’t go along with this, you are against Vatican 2”.

The only council document that really directly brought about much change was the document on the liturgy. The other documents simply reflected the changes already underway. Laity were already far more active than several decades earlier. Religious orders were already in processes of renewal. Media, education, etc, all reflected recent trends, rather than causing them.

V2 was a snapshot of where the Church was already going, other than the liturgy. Most documents are mundane.

This is all separate from the implementation of the “spirit” of V2.
 
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There is much negative comment about the Second Council of the Vatican .

A lot of vague , empty carping .

I prefer to hear what Pope John Paul II had to say about this Sacred Council .

Pope John Paul II said , “The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council has been a gift of the Spirit to his Church… The “little seed” which John XXIII planted “with anxious mind and hand” in the Basilica of St Paul-Outside-the-Walls on 25 January 1959, when he announced his intention to convoke the 21st Ecumenical Council in the Church’s history, has grown and become a tree which now spreads its majestic and mighty branches in the Vineyard of the Lord… The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council was truly a prophetic message for the Church’s life; it will continue to be so for many years in the third millennium .”
 
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That is what my mom tells me. She grew up during the changes and says they thought it was great when mass was said in English.

What then is your theory of the recent upsurge of youth being attracted to the EF? Is it just because it is different to them or is there some genuine thing that attracts them to it?
I’m in a young adult Catholic group and it is really amazing how many I almost would say have a preference for the extraordinary form.
 
Onthisrock84 said:
What then is your theory of the recent upsurge of youth being attracted to the EF?
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Over all, I don’t think there is as much interest in Latin Mass as people get the impression there is from seeing it on the internet.

I quoted a stat a piece back that the SSPX has just 25000 attending mass in the United States, there are 70 million Catholics.

Even if diocesan-approved Masses attract three times as many, its still not that much in comparison to 70 million…

The internet is able to magnify relatively small groups into the next big thing.

As far as the motivation of young people who are involved in Latin liturgy, I give them the benefit of the doubt on this, and will take their word for the reason for their interest.
 
How many young people agree on anything that their parents do or say? The grandparent generation or the even older is “new, exiting and exotic” to young people. Few would name their children after their parents but very likely use one or more names of the grandparent or great grandparent generation. It is very common to rebell against your parents when being a teenager and young adult and follow the lead of peers and the older generation. Then when the young adults start their own families, they raise their children in the same way they were brought up as this is what they know.

Humans beings… … …
 
While @Rob2 prefer to hear what John Paul II said, I prefer to hear what Archbishop Lefebvre said back in Lille, 1976:

And now when I am doing the same thing, exactly the same thing I have done for 30 years, all of a sudden I am suspended a divinis , and perhaps I shall soon be excommunicated, separated from the Church, a renegade, or what have you! How can that be? Am I also at risk of being suspended a divinis because of the work I did for 30 years?

I think, on the contrary, that if then I had been forming seminarians as they are being formed now in the new seminaries I would have been excommunicated. If then I had taught the catechism which is being taught in the schools, I should have been called a heretic. And if I had said Mass as it is now said I should have been called suspect of heresy and outside of the Church. It is beyond my understanding. It means something has changed in the Church…"
 
Probably just me, but the very nature of the question strikes me as biased. Who asks this about Vatican I? Who asks it about the Council of Florence, or any other council? There is a very vocal and seemingly growing rank of disobedience and dissension in the Church regarding Vatican II - normally by those who know little or nothing about its actual content.

Was Vatican II implemented as well as possible? I don’t think anyone will claim that.

Rather, shouldn’t we ask how to better implement VII?
 
You bring up some good points.

First, merely posing a neutral question in a polarized forum can trigger a virtual street fight. If I were to start a thread asking what the US would be like if Donald Trump were not elected President, I wouldn’t expect a thoughtful discussion.
po18guy said:
Rather, shouldn’t we ask how to better implement VII?
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That would a much more productive conversation starter.
 
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All of a sudden, we have questions about the Church teaching heresy, about excommunicating the Pope, about what the Church would be like without Vatican II, blah blah blah. There is a negative note sounding (or resounding) in all such questions, regardless of intent.

What the Church is woefully lacking these days is simple obedience. That, and prayer.

Gossip, murmuring and detraction cannot help the Church. The silence of prayer certainly can.
 
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For one thing, I might have received better catechizing growing up. I never knew that receiving while in a state of mortal sin is a mortal sin itself, for example. That’s a pretty big omission. I might have learned that if I don’t give up meat on Fridays, I need to do some other form of penance. VII didn’t dictate poor catechism classes — but it definitely made room for them.
 
gracepoole said:
VII didn’t dictate poor catechism classes — but it definitely made room for them.
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There were a number of crappy catechism teachers before and during V2 as well as after.

There were also inattentive students during all 3 periods of time as well.
 
I’m sure that’s true. But everyone in preceding generations in my own family can still recite the Baltimore Catechism, all know to perform an act of penance on Fridays, and all believe in the True Presence. That’s a pretty big boast from my limited perspective.
 
Onthisrock84 said:
Just hypothetically speaking.
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The problem with speculating on alternative history is that there cannot possibly be any evidence, making all such questions more philosophical than practical. I prefer to look at this type of question like a Rorschach ink blot, where the answers that people give reveal information about the person who is answering, and nothing about the inherent nature of the blot.
 
I grew up before Vatican II and during Vatican II.

The Latin Mass had abuses and priests back then were up on pedestals which led to abuse.

Yes, not all the sexual abuse cases were by post -Vatican II priest. Cardinal McCarrick was ordained before Vatican II.

As far as believing in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, that depends on who you talk to. I had aunts and uncles who did not even know this was the teaching before I told them.

Abuses in the liturgy also took place, but less noticed because Catholics generally sat in the pews and waited for Mass to get over. The priest who said the Mass the fastest, got the larger attendance in the parish. The priest who was nasty in Confession, got the least amount of people who attended. In my parish, the priest who said the Mass the fastest was also the most cruel in the confessional.

Don’t blame Vatican II, blame the culture and the changes that took people away from many of the traditions in the nation and in religion.

Jim
 
pnewton said:
The problem with speculating on alternative history is that there cannot possibly be any evidence
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That is correct.

What would have happened if Lee would have won at Gettysburg?

Or if America invaded Japan in 1946 instead of dropping the bomb?

How about if Martel had lost at Tours, or Sobieski declined to intervene at Vienna?

A lot of moving parts in all of those question, and no one can really say.
 
JimR-OCDS said:
Yes, not all the sexual abuse cases were by post -Vatican II priest.
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The Post V2 priests were the same people as the pre V2 priests. They were just given different prayers to pray and different procedures to follow.

Further, what a lot of people don’t realize is that there was an intermediate form of the liturgy between 1962 and 1970, where part of the Mass was in vernacular and part in Latin.

It just wasn’t one big 180 turn.
 
And Vatican II gave the Bishop’s time to experiment with the liturgy before making a final judgement on the changes.

Fact is, the vernacular was so quickly and widely accepted, it became the norm in most places.

Jim
 
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