What fruit do you believe has come from Vatican II?

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Commenter do you know what this was though? At least there was some movement toward unity, it is sad to hear some Lutherans have moved further away in belief and/or practice though.

Sadly we know that any Christian community that moves away from orthodoxy in belief is always moving from life to death and ultimately will not last through the generations.

It looks like the 21st century will be tremendously challenging in terms of theology and what it means to be human, as Artificial Intelligence and other technologies become more sophisticated.
 
Artificial Intelligence (the good stuff) will be limited to the military. And even then, it will be compartmentalized. I’m sure they saw the Terminator movies. Business will have very limited access. Other technologies are showing their lack of utility by being hacked on an increasing basis.

Being human will not be a problem.
 
My thoughts on what VII has given to us…
  • Universal Call to Holiness
  • Increased Lay Involvement
  • Updating of the Church to more effectively evangelize the world
  • Resourcement - returning to the sources and letting go of non-essential attachments in the Church like elaborate vestments and excessive pageantry/ceremony in the Church
  • Greater clarity on Mary… clearly establishing as a member of the Church who was saved by God.
  • Increased emphasis on social justice in alignment with papal encyclical Rerum Novarum
The infighting and division in the Church are regrettable and tough to deal with but is not atypical following an ecumenical council.
 
Being human will not be a problem but human anthropology and the understanding of the human person is what can be the problem for those without any knowledge of God. That is already clear in terms of young people who are atheist now getting confused about what it means to be male and female,

Sharing the loving understanding of human anthropology in the church is a gift to those confused about their identity.
 
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Overall, Vatican II was supposed to make the Church more effective at her mission in the modern world. Instead, we have been steamrolled by the modern world. In that sense, Vatican II has been a failure and produced little fruit (what little fruit it has produced has been outweighed by the losses 10 fold). I fully hold the Council’s acts to be orthodox and the intentions to be good, but the fact is those intentions have not been fulfilled successfully.

For the OP, grace still works obviously, but lay groups have actually mostly dried up–so many sodalities and confraternities are gone or dwindled in numbers–which only makes sense since fewer Catholics are practicing in general.
 
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To add to my post above, we can go document by document, look at the good intentions of each, and see the result in every case has, sadly, been failure.

Constitutions:

Church: understanding of the most basic truths about the Church were thrown into confusion (CDF has had to intervene at least four times to clarify that the Catholic Church alone is still the sole Church of Christ) and rather than being treated as a necessary “sacrament of salvation” salvation became generally presumed to be found everywhere.

Modern World: the nature of man has been thrown into more confusion than ever and the world is less Christian and more hostile to the Church.

Liturgy–belief in the real presence and understanding of the meaning of Mass has plummeted, liturgical abuses went way up, and Mass attendance and participation on Sundays has plummeted (not to mention vocations to the priesthood).

Revelation: at least in my experience, the Scriptures are treated more like error riddled human writings by clergy than before. “Development of doctrine” is now used as justification for substantial change.

Declarations:

Education: once solid Catholic institutions have mostly been completely secularized

Other religions: there have been excesses into indifferentism, an increase in hostile sects, with little common goals being achieved (society has gotten even more secular and hostile to religion).

Religious Freedom: instead of the true doctrine of religions freedom found in the declaration and catechism, instead what was spread and implemented in once Catholic countries was the false version condemned so often that makes relative conscience supreme, and separates the truth about God and man from public life.

Decrees:

Laity: the faithful are just as, if not more divided between their private faith and what they think society should be shaped like (just look at polls on issues like same-sex marriage).

Ecumenism: most non-Catholic communities have gotten farther away from the Catholic Church in their doctrine (especially with regards to morality, gender issues, and sacramental practice), and religious indifferentism and irenicism has spread more in the Catholic Church

Missions: the urgency of seeking conversions for the salvation of souls has too often been suppressed and replaced with merely spreading social development

Religious: most of the convents and monasteries emptied and many of those left turned to un- or non-Christian activities (weird cosmic evolution stuff, reiki, or just plain secular social work).

Eastern Churches: see above re Constitution on the Church and decree on ecumenism

Communications: dissenting publications multiplied

Bishops: most bishops seem to act more like careerist middle management, and less like vicars of Christ than ever.

Priests/Training: vocations fell, priests leaving multiplied, priests promoting their own opinions and doing their own thing in the liturgy went way up, discipline became lax, not to mention the scandals increasing…
 
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commenter said:
The question is how relevant it is now. The world has changed more since the 1960s to present, than it did between Trent and V2. V2 never foresaw the massive attack on Reason, legal abortion, gay marriage, and the abanonment of dogma by many powerful in the Church.

These are not fruits of V2, but current realities of 2019 we have to deal with.
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It seems to me Vatican II itself is ultimately out of date—not those points of perennial doctrine that are never out of date, but its pastoral outlook and approach (its predominate concern) which was geared to certain circumstances which are now radically different (“pastoral” ultimately means applying the faith to concrete circumstances).

St. John XXIII in his opening speech orients the Council’s approach in light of certain circumstances. For example, he says “the fundamental doctrine of the Church which has repeatedly been taught by the Fathers and by ancient and modern theologians…is presumed to be well known and familiar to all.” This presumption is no longer valid.

Likewise, with regard to the errors in the world, he says
But all such error is so manifestly contrary to rightness and goodness, and produces such fatal results, that our contemporaries show every inclination to condemn it of their own accord—especially that way of life which repudiates God and His law, and which places excessive confidence in technical progress and an exclusively material prosperity. It is more and more widely understood that personal dignity and true self-realization are of vital importance and worth every effort to achieve. More important still, experience has at long last taught men that physical violence, armed might, and political domination are no help at all in providing a happy solution to the serious problems which affect them.
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Again, this is no longer the case at all.

This contingent nature of the Council’s decisions are noted by the Council itself in its acts, and in the explanations of the relators to the bishops. For one example, Gaudium et spes, in its first footnote, says:
Some elements have a permanent value; others, only a transitory one…Interpreters must bear in mind—especially in part two—the changeable circumstances which the subject matter, by its very nature, involves.
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Circumstances have changed radically in the modern world since 1965. What is needed is not therefore a faithful implementation of Vatican II—that time has passed (except for those points of immutable truth it teaches), but its whole pastoral approach and analysis of the circumstances of the world needs to be re-evaluated.
 
Genesis315 said:
Overall, Vatican II was supposed to make the Church more effective at her mission in the modern world. Instead, we have been steamrolled by the modern world. In that sense, Vatican II has been a failure and produced little fruit (what little fruit it has produced has been outweighed by the losses 10 fold). I fully hold the Council’s acts to be orthodox and the intentions to be good, but the fact is those intentions have not been fulfilled successfully.
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What you’re saying is that the problem was not the Council, but the clergy and laity who failed to implement it. But I think the problem is that you fail to see the big picture.

European Catholics left the Church for Protestantism in droves before, during, and after the Council of Trent. Not only were seminaries and convents in disarray and liturgical and doctrinal abuses spread by local clergy rampant prior to Trent, it took generations for things to change. The Counter-reformation saw rather rise of the likes of St Teresa of Avila, who reformed the Carmelite order that had become lax, spiritually stagnant and lost it’s purpose, filled with political influence and wealth that had turned monasteries into places focused on worldly frivolity. St John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, etc. spent their life working in the vineyard during the Counter-Reformation movement, which was never easy and filled with challenges.

While the Church was disintegrating in Europe, it was increasing in numbers in the New World because of Spanish missionary work; as 8 million European Catholics left the Church, 8 million converts replaced them in Mexico.

Today, while secularism devastates Western culture, there is an influx of zeal coming into the Church in other parts of the world.

EWTN alone is an example of the fruits of Vatican II. It was the Vatican II’s Inter Mirifica that made it possible for a cloistered nun to establish what would become the Eternal Word Catholic Television Network, starting from a small garage in Alabama, but today encompasses vast regions of the world reaching hundreds of millions of Catholics and non-Catholics. Catholic Answers is predominantly run by former Protestants, and countless of former Protestants are bringing their zeal into the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II. There are many many good things happening in the non-English speaking Catholic world too, with good men and women that God has raised.

Today the only problem is that there are too many people complaining about the problems instead of actually becoming part of the movement in the Church to impacts the age in which we live. In every age there always were, are, and will be wolves and weeds among both the clergy and the laity alongside those who are striving for holiness.

The Catholic laity need to understand today is that the whole point of Vatican II was to awaken the Christian laity to go into the world and spread the light of Christ. I urge everyone to listen to this brief talk by Archbishop Sheen:
CLICK HERE to listen
 
Vatican II, as scapegoat, is a false argument. All those Hippies, Anarchists and dissidents that appeared inside the Church and in our neighborhoods, had one mission: to preach corruption disguised as freedom. We were more trusting in the mid-1960s. Too trusting, and our trust was taken advantage of. The media, as Pope Benedict has told us, helped to distort the message of Vatican II. The false teachers wanted us to reject the Church and our parents. They wanted us to accept their illegal drug using, have sex with anybody lifestyle. And there were a ton of books on Eastern mysticism appearing on college campuses. It was an attempt to scatter the flock by directly attacking the family, which is the foundational cell of any society. Disrupt that and then market The Pill as freedom - a false freedom - from what they said was Fear. Fear of what? Babies.
 
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Well as someone born in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1980s (from an atheist/agnostic typical secular family) I was already jaded with what the world was offering. It was already being seen as clearly lies, empty, self-centred, materialistic and lacking all hope. The cultural desolation around me made it easy to recognize Christ and although I knew next to nothing about Christianity and absolutely nothing about the Catholic church I was still attracted to Her when I looked for a community to explore the very, tiny, tiny possibility there might be a God.

I think the harvest is very rich out there but it seems due to internal confusion the Catholic church was (is) doing barely any evangelism. As soon as I met Catholics who were actively looking for souls my conversion came about very rapidly.

I found out later the leadership of the prayer group, young men and women in their early to mid-20s, were fasting on bread and water, praying before the Blesssed Sacrament, saying rosaries, all for the souls of local young people. I was one of MANY in their harvest.

Vatican II was first and foremost an Evangelical council to help the church adapt to reach the modern world. We have gone (and will continue to go through until the Second Coming) terrible trials as a church. But we still have the living Jesus and people still want Him, if He is offered to them in a way they can respond to.
 
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I heard Father Riccardo on Catholic Radio. He was talking to his weekly Men’s Group. He asked them, “If you aren’t out there evangelizing, why not?” He’s in Michigan. But it’s not hard to find out how other parishes are doing it.
https://www.gbdioc.org/newevangeliz...library/catholic-evangelization-programs.html

I was shown street evangelization by someone I knew. It requires discernment and may not be the right thing to do unless going with a group.
 
SuscipeMeDomine said:
Updating the Liturgy of the Hours to make it more widely accessible has benefited untold numbers, particularly laypeople
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I echo this as one of my favorite things to come out of Vatican II. The old office is certainly beautiful, but I love how accessible the new one is. I can teach almost anyone how to pray it in a few days really, with one good sit-down session on it and then a few days of practice. It’s something I plan on working into the liturgical life of whatever parish is cursed to have me inflicted upon it as its pastor in the coming years.

The documents of Vatican II are also really worth a read, and something I think gets missed out on in many of the discussions of the Council. How ironic, we talk about all the things the Council supposedly did, and yet we hardly talk of what it actually produced. Then again, many of the actual directives of the Council, particularly with regards to the liturgy, were ignored or outright contradicted. But at the same time, read the documents, look at what the whole direction of the project was. So many people focus on the aggiornamento, the “bringing up to date” aspect, whether for better or for worse. But there was another current in play, one of the school of thought to which Pope Benedict XVI belonged, as well as other names such as Congar, von Balthasar, de Lubac. This was the ressourcement, the “returning to the sources.” Those of the Communio school, named for the journal which they founded, and which still continues, looked around to the modern situation and the way the Church was poised to interact with it, and they saw a great resonance with the situation in the earliest days of the Church. So the question became–how did the Fathers respond to their moment in history, and how can we model the Church’s response to modern problems on theirs? This, more than anything, has borne much fruit in recent years, and is perhaps the most important legacy of the Council. We’re paying greater attention to the sources of how we talk about what it is we believe.

-Fr ACEGC
 
My husband and I were chatting last night. He had never heard of VII and had no idea that the Mass was in Latin previously and the priest would face the same way as the people. So that was an interesting conversation ☺️
 
I think Evangelism can take as many forms as people. Just a quiet chat at work, or comforting someone who is suffering shows them the Church and therefore Jesus in action. I think Catholics have a tendency to think Evangelism = proclaiming to strangers and handing out tracts which scares us! But that is just one well known method.
 
The joint declarations and other documents (Catholic-protestant and Catholic-Orthodox) include what both parties can agree on at the time they are written. There are always more topics to discuss and agree or disagree on. Sometimes the declarations can be very “thin” if you are used to studying Theology in depth and have read for example Thomas of Aquinas Summa.
 
Catholics are going door to door. They are handing out tracts. They are inviting their neighbors to Church. One of the things we can do is tell other people who Jesus Christ is.
 
That sounds wonderful EdWest. When I was an atheist/agnostic/lost person I used to occasionally wonder about religion and think “where are all the Christians? You never meet them down the pub” (I am English). I literally knew noone who was a practicing Christian of any sort (to my knowledge).

I just found out from a friend about an order of sisters called The Little Sisters of Jesus http://www.petitessoeursdejesus.net/en
They go wherever they feel Jesus is asking them to be, among people living their ordinary lives and one sister works in a pub! I thought that was fantastic! Apparently she is very tall and robust as she was an Olympic swimmer. Another sister works in the circus and another lives with the Travellers in England. The Travellers are mostly of Irish descent and one of the groups of people under the umbrella of what the general public will call “Gypsies” although they are not related to the Roma or the classical groups of people given that name. The Little Sister lives with them and travels with them, and experiences the same persecutions they do as there are strong prejudices against them from the wider population. I just love their charism they are being the salt that Jesus tells us we must be in the world.
 
Your concerns are real. But correlation does not prove causation.

Better to say the Church, and everything else, was hit by a secular tidal wave. V2 helped us prepare in some ways, and did not foresee what was needed in other ways.

Implementation was faithful on some areas, and agenda-driven in other areas, especially Religious Ed.
 
According to the Church the reverse causation is true - that Vatican II was to address these very problems. Most of the declines seen and blamed on Vatican II started before 1970.
 
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