What hath 'the spirit of Vatican II' wrought?

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What hath ‘the spirit of Vatican II’ wrought?

By Matt C. Abbott

The following is a reprint of a chapter (minus endnotes) from Catholic attorney/scholar Peter B. Kelly’s book Cleansing Fire(which I’ve featured in previous columns as well — here, here and here). The chapter contains substantial information from another book: Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church since Vatican II, authored by Kenneth C. Jones. Many thanks to Mr. Kelly and Mr. Jones for allowing me to reprint their material.

**Chapter 38

A Statistical Analysis**

“The message (of the Third Secret of Fatima) was not to be opened before 1960. I asked Lucy: ‘Why this date?’ And she answered me: ‘Because then it will be clearer (mais claro).’ This made me think that the message was prophetic in tone, precisely because the prophesies, as we see in Sacred Scripture, are covered with a veil of mystery. … In 1960, she said, the message would be clearer.”

— Cardinal Ottaviani (speaking about the Third Secret of Fatima at the great hall of the Antonianum, Pontifical Marian Academy, February 11, 1967)

“The devil is in the process of engaging in a decisive battle with the Virgin. And the devil knows what it is that most offends God and which in a short space of time will gain for him the greatest number of souls. Thus the devil does everything to overcome souls consecrated to God because in this way, the devil will succeed in leaving the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, and thereby the more easily will he seize them.”

— Sister Lucy’s disclosures to Father Fuentes

“What some refer to as a ‘vocations crisis’ is, rather, one of the many fruits of the Second Vatican Council, a sign of God’s deep love for the Church, and an invitation to a more creative and effective ordering of gifts and energy in the Body of Christ.”

— Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Holy Thursday, April 20, 2000.

“Without priests the sacramental nature of the Church will disappear. We’ll become a Protestant church without the sacraments.”
  • Cardinal Godfried Daneels, London Catholic Times, May, 2000.
“Certainly the results (of Vatican II) seem cruelly opposed to the expectations of everyone, beginning with those of Pope John XXIII and then of Pope Paul VI: expected was a new Catholic unity and instead we have been exposed to dissension which, to use the words of Pope Paul VI, seems to have gone from self-criticism to self-destruction. Expected was a new enthusiasm, and many wound up discouraged and bored. Expected was a great step forward, instead we find ourselves faced with a progressive process of decadence which has developed for the most part under the sign of a calling back to the Council, and has therefore contributed to discrediting it for many. The net result therefore seems negative. I am repeating here what I said ten years after the conclusion of the work: it is incontrovertible that this period has definitely been unfavorable for the Catholic Church.”

— Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 1984.

“It’s chic to declare yourself a Protestant in France these days. In intellectual circles, it is also chic to reveal yourself as a Jew. But if you admit to being a Roman Catholic, you’ll trigger howls of derisive laughter.”

— Sociologist Daniele Hervieu-Leger, UPI, March 13, 2001.

“And will not God revenge his elect who cry to him day and night? And will he have patience in their regard? I say to you that he will quickly revenge them. But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?”

— Luke 18:7-8

“The dechristianization of Europe is a reality.”

— Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Le Spectacle du Monde, January, 2000.

RESEARCH MEMO

Re: Statistical Analysis of the Post-Vatican II Collapse of the Catholic Church in America

Source: Jones, Kenneth C.: Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II

Roman Catholic Books, P. O. Box 2286, Fort Collins, CO 80522-2286. (Original ISBN: 0-9728688-0-1)

In the introduction to his book, Kenneth Jones begins by accurately explaining that when Pope John XXIII began his Second Vatican Council in 1962, the American Catholic Church “was in the midst of an unprecedented period of growth.” He reports that “bishops were ordaining record numbers of priests and building scores of seminaries to handle the surge in vocations. Young women by the thousands gave up lives of comfort for the austerity of the convent. These nuns taught millions of students in the huge system of parochial and private schools. The ranks of Catholics swelled as parents brought in their babies for baptism and adult converts flocked to the Church. Lines outside the confessional were long, and by some estimates three quarters of the faithful went to Mass every Sunday.”

There is an old American proverb that is still in constant use because it is both practical and profound. The saying is used to both preserve successes and avoid unnecessary failures on both a large and small scale. If only Pope John XXIII had chosen to reject those Modernist voices looking for a Conciliar opportunity to derail the efficient and on-time train of Roman Catholicism by simply reciting, with the Italian accent of a practical peasant: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

To be continued in the next post…
 
John XXIII was dubbed “Good” Pope John by his manipulators and Modernist “puppet masters” — as if to distinguish him from his saintly, sophisticated and uncompromising predecessors who the Modernists must have considered “bad” because they saw their corrupting progressive agendas for what they were.

Poor Pope John! He appeared to have been selected by the Modernists in the conclave precisely because of his naïveté as a curial outsider and a non-theologian diplomat who could be easily manipulated and sold on the false promise of a new Council. If even the inside player, Paul VI, could be subsequently betrayed into tears by the Modernist plan to re-spin Lumen Gentium after the Council, leading him to compose the nota explicativa, Pope John was a pathetically easy mark. He was a pious man, so giving him the benefit of the doubt, he was probably unaware that he was being completely used by the Modernists to bring on a Council intended to stall-out a revving Traditional Church.

Pope John gave the ironic opening speech at the Council. There he chided those Catholics who saw no need for a Council when everything was going so well. He said: “We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.” The Holy Ghost led Pope John to his election and, as a favor, must have blessed him with truthful, if gloomy, prophets to guide him regarding his Second Vatican Council. But just as Moses struck the rock twice, even God’s chosen leader can fail to always use good judgment. Pope John gave the order that marched his Church into a complete disaster — that, at least, was forecast by some.

Mr. Jones had gathered and presented in his book various American body counts resulting from the internal ecclesial war that tumbled out on to the streets as a result of Vatican II. If the goal of the enemy of the Church was to strategically diminish the Catholic Church as an effective organization in saving souls for eternity, the enemy must have been gloating since 1965 when the Council ended.

Jones’ presentation speaks for itself:

"Priests: After skyrocketing from about 27,000 in 1930 to 58,000 in 1965, the number of priests in the United States thereafter dropped to 45,000 in 2002. By 2020, there will be about 31,000 priests — and only 15,000 will be under the age of 70. Right now there are more priests age 80 to 84 than there are age 30 to 34.

"Ordinations: In 1965 there were 1,575 American ordinations to the priesthood, in 2002 there were 450, a decline of 350 percent. Taking into account ordinations, deaths and departures, in 1965 there was a net gain of 725 priests. In 1998, there was a net loss of 810.

"Priest-less parishes: About 3 percent of U.S. parishes, or 549, were without a resident priest in 1965. In 2002 there were 2,928 priest-less parishes, about 15 percent of U.S. parishes. By 2020, a quarter of all parishes, 4,656, will have no priest.

"Seminaries: Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians dropped from 49,000 to 4,700 — a 90 percent decrease. Without any students, seminaries across the country have been sold or shuttered. There were 596 seminaries in 1965, and only 200 in 2002. There were over three times as many total seminarians in 1930 as in 2002. There were over seven times as many religious order seminarians in 1945 as in 2002. There were over three times as many diocesan seminarians in 1945 as in 2002. There were more seminaries in 1955 than in 2002. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of U.S. diocesan seminaries decreased by 33 percent. In that same thirty seven year period, the number of U.S. religious seminaries decreased by 75 percent.

"Sisters: 180,000 sisters were the backbone of the American Catholic education and health systems in 1965. In 2002, there were 75,000 sisters, with an average age of 68. By 2020, the number of sisters will drop to 40,000 — and of these, only 21,000 will be age 70 or under. In 1965, 104,000 sisters were teaching, while in 2002 there were only 8,200 teachers. That is a reduction of about 92 percent. There were over nine times as many sisters teaching in 1945 as in 2002.

"Brothers: The number of professed brothers decreased from about 12,000 in 1965 to 5,700 in 2002, with a further drop to 3,100 in 2020. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of brothers teaching decreased by 80 percent. There were three times as many brothers teaching in 1945 as in 2002.

"Religious Orders: The religious orders will soon be virtually nonexistent in the United States. For example, in 1965 there were 5,277 Jesuit priests and 3,559 seminarians; in 2000 there were 3,172 priests and 389 seminarians. There were 2,534 OFM Franciscan priests and 2,251 seminarians in 1965; in 2000 there were 1,492 priests and 60 seminarians. There were 2,434 Christian Brothers in 1965 and 912 seminarians; in 2000 there were 959 Brothers and 7 seminarians. There were 1,148 Redemptorist priests in 1965 and 1,128 seminarians; in 2000 there were 349 priests and 24 seminarians. Every major religious order in the United States mirrors these statistics of decline.

"High Schools: Between 1965 and 2002 the number of diocesan high schools fell from 1,566 to 786. At the same time the number of students dropped from almost 700,000 to 386,000. There were more private Catholic high schools in 1945 than in 2002. There were more than twice as many diocesan high schools in 1945 as in 2002.

"Parochial Grade Schools: There were 10,503 parochial grade schools in 1965 and 6,623 in 2002. The number of students plummeted from 4.5 million to 1.9 million. There were more parochial grade schools in 1930 than in 2002.

The remainder of this article (and the statistics) can be read here:

renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/100119
 
I subscribe to Matt’s blog and get weekley updates from the website. I highly reccommend it!!! He tells the truth and what is happening. The stats above prove that there is a crisis going on and we need to get back on course. The Church must talk more about the evils of Modernism, and progressives, and Liberials and Feminists! Root them out and place them with the chaft!
 
To answer the question asked in the subject line----NOTHING GOOD
 
This modernist thinking is spread even to the protestant churches. The Episcopal church ordains homosexuals and the others are not far behind. They will be “Marrying” homosexuals soon. They have watered down their message and bibles for political correctness. Think what you want about Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Calvin etc, but they would not recognize what has become of mainstream protestantism in America.
Traditional Christianity is under assault in America from within and without. As Catholics it affects you even though you may think it does not.

Personally I will always consider Vatican II to have been disastrous for the RCC in the US.
 
Vatican II is obviously not understood here. Here are the documents:

vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/index.htm

Read them and understand them.

1963 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is published. It encourages women to feel frustrated.

1966 Betty Friedan co-founds and is the first President of the National Organization for Women, a propaganda organization whose first purpose is to create a state of distrust and suspicion between women and men and, later, to promote women killing their own babies. For those who want to understand when radical anti-men feminism began, here it is.

1968 Hippies run around demanding Freedom. Freedom from God. Freedom from mom, dad, priests and nuns. Smoke dope! Shack up! Woodstock Nation!

1970s Pornography is sold in Adult Bookstores which open everywhere. Topless go-go bars open everywhere, It’s OK, It’s legal.

1973 Abortion legalized.

A lot of Catholics in the late 1960s were taken in by the Peace and Love Hippies. Stop the War in Vietnam! “Try to love one another right now.” But there was a price to pay. Normal Catholic guys and girls decided to try dope, to shack up, to leave years of religious education behind because they wrongly trusted a small group of anarchist radicals.

I met a woman who asked me if I could talk to her. She said I was around her son’s age. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He won’t listen to me anymore. He hangs out with the wrong kind of people. I don’t know what to do.” This woman could not understand what had happened to her son.

A generation of Catholics that was too naive and too trusting, including a few priests and nuns, was taken advantage of by people professing peace and love, or so they said. In a few, years, it was all about sex. Dirty bookstores, topless bars and increasingly sexualized TV shows and movies.

Did Vatican II do this? No.

Why were priests and nuns quitting in 1970? Read this Time magazine cover story:

time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19700223,00.html

Peace,
Ed
 
agrange said:
This modernist thinking is spread even to the protestant churches. The Episcopal church ordains homosexuals and the others are not far behind. They will be “Marrying” homosexuals soon. They have watered down their message and bibles for political correctness. Think what you want about Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Calvin etc, but they would not recognize what has become of mainstream protestantism in America.
Traditional Christianity is under assault in America from within and without. As Catholics it affects you even though you may think it does not.

Personally I will always consider Vatican II to have been disastrous for the RCC in the US.
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Vatican II was the opportunity the dissidents within the Church needed to strike:
NeelyAnn said:
**As the Flame of Catholic Dissent Dies Out **

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
The Wall Street Journal
January 14, 2010

Mary Daly, a retired professor at Boston College who was probably the most outré of all the dissident theologians who came to the fore of Catholic intellectual life in the years right after the Second Vatican Council, died on Jan. 3 at age 81. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, which might be called the golden age of Catholic dissidence, theologians who took positions challenging traditional church teachings—ranging from the authority of the pope to bans on birth control, premarital sex, and women’s ordination—dominated Catholic intellectual life in America and Europe. They seemed to represent a tide that would overwhelm the old restrictions and their hidebound adherents.

Now, 45 years after Vatican II concluded in 1965, most of those bright lights of dissident Catholicism—from the theologian Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen to Charles Curran, the priest dismissed from the Catholic University of America’s theology faculty in 1987 for his advocacy of contraception and acceptance of homosexual relationships—seem dimmed with advanced age, if not extinguished. They have left no coherent second generation of dissident Catholic intellectuals to follow them.

Prof. Daly certainly pushed the envelope. In 1968, she published “The Church and the Second Sex,” a book that accused the Catholic Church of oppressing and “humiliating” women by excluding them from its “patriarchal” hierarchy. The title of her most famous work, “Beyond God the Father” (1973), is self-explanatory. At some point afterward, Prof. Daly, despite being raised Catholic and earning degrees in theology and literature from three different Catholic colleges plus the University of Fribourg, left the church to embrace ever more belligerent brands of feminism.

She got into trouble with Boston College, the Jesuit institution where she had taught since 1966, for barring men from her advanced classes in women’s studies. In the wake of a sex-discrimination complaint launched by a male student, Prof. Daly and her employer engaged in a round of litigation during the late 1990s that culminated in her voluntary retirement in 2001. She spent her last years promoting vegetarianism, antifur activism, a protest of Condoleezza Rice’s 2006 commencement speech at Boston College, and the coining of male-baiting neologisms (an example: “mister-ectomy”).

The trajectory of her life story is not unusual among Catholic dissidents. The Young Turk of Vatican II—and pet of the progressive Catholic media of the time—was Hans Küng. A Swiss-born, movie-star-handsome priest whom Pope John XXIII had made a peritus, or theological adviser, to the council, Father Küng swept through a tour of U.S. Catholic universities to accolades in 1963. And his 1971 book questioning papal infallibility—which got him stripped of his license to teach Catholic theology in 1979—turned him into a living martyr among progressives. He is still at Tübingen (last heard from in October blasting Pope Benedict XVI’s overtures to conservative Anglicans as “angling in the waters of the extreme religious right”), but he’s 81.

The Belgian Dominican priest Edward Schillebeeckx, who had worked unsuccessfully to persuade the assembled bishops of the Second Vatican Council to downgrade the authority of the pope—and who was condemned in 1986 for holding that there was no biblical support for the ordaining of Catholic priests—died in December at age 95. The Rev. Charles Curran, who was a controversial figure at Catholic University as early as 1967, when he was temporarily removed from his tenured position over his views on birth control, and who moved to Southern Methodist University after his final dismissal from Catholic two decades later, is now 75.

Another prominent figure in liberal Catholic intellectual circles is Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, who is famous for her assertions that Jesus was a feminist and that God should be referred to as “she” as well as “he,” as well as for her advice that progressive orders of nuns treat representatives of a planned Vatican investigation like “uninvited guests.” She is also past retirement age and is listed as “professor emerita” at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif.

So where is the second generation of brilliant progressive Catholic theologians? There are plenty of liberal lay Catholics. The church’s ban on artificial birth control is nearly a dead letter, a majority of Catholics say they believe their church should ordain women, and 40% have no moral objections to abortion, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. But dissident Catholicism seems to have lost steam as an intellectual movement, and not only because the issues relating to sex and papal authority that originally sparked Catholic dissidents have not changed in nearly 50 years.
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It was a two pronged attack. The radical Feminists and the Hippies were on the outside. It was the laity that bore the brunt of it but seminaries were also negatively affected in the 1970s.

Peace,
Ed
 
Millions now recognise the universal call to holiness, and try to live it.
 
edwest2 said:
Vatican II is obviously not understood here. Here are the documents:

vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/index.htm

Read them and understand them.

1963 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is published. It encourages women to feel frustrated.

1966 Betty Friedan co-founds and is the first President of the National Organization for Women, a propaganda organization whose first purpose is to create a state of distrust and suspicion between women and men and, later, to promote women killing their own babies. For those who want to understand when radical anti-men feminism began, here it is.

1968 Hippies run around demanding Freedom. Freedom from God. Freedom from mom, dad, priests and nuns. Smoke dope! Shack up! Woodstock Nation!

1970s Pornography is sold in Adult Bookstores which open everywhere. Topless go-go bars open everywhere, It’s OK, It’s legal.

1973 Abortion legalized.

A lot of Catholics in the late 1960s were taken in by the Peace and Love Hippies. Stop the War in Vietnam! “Try to love one another right now.” But there was a price to pay. Normal Catholic guys and girls decided to try dope, to shack up, to leave years of religious education behind because they wrongly trusted a small group of anarchist radicals.

I met a woman who asked me if I could talk to her. She said I was around her son’s age. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He won’t listen to me anymore. He hangs out with the wrong kind of people. I don’t know what to do.” This woman could not understand what had happened to her son.

A generation of Catholics that was too naive and too trusting, including a few priests and nuns, was taken advantage of by people professing peace and love, or so they said. In a few, years, it was all about sex. Dirty bookstores, topless bars and increasingly sexualized TV shows and movies.

Did Vatican II do this? No.

Why were priests and nuns quitting in 1970? Read this Time magazine cover story:

time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19700223,00.html

Peace,
Ed
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It certainly didn’t help that they went from crew cuts and jackets and ties in schools, and teaching kids to be soldiers of Christ fighting the communists, to long-haired hippy types playing guitars at Mass and the “opening” to the Soviet Bloc.

It must have been hard to convince your kids not to become hippies when they were being given pride of place at Mass.

God Bless
 
I’ll offer a different perspective, at least as it pertains to the U.S. The Catholic Church here
was really an ethnic culture. Within 2 or 3 city blocks you would find the Polish church, then Italian, German, Irish, etc. The parish and community were one. However, after WWII the G.I. Bill allowed a lot of people to get better educated, get better jobs, make more money, and get a better house in the suburbs. Catholic Americans lost their ethnic identity and in many cases this is what really bound them to the Church.

The challenge to the Church is how to make the Faith relevant to people when you no longer have the ethnic tie. I really don’t think that the current state of the Church has much to do with V2.
 
The Hippies I knew had no desire for the Church or Authority figures or The Establishment.

“We’re going to burn this country down!”

A Hippie friend of mine at the time had this to say about marriage:

“I don’t need no piece of paper to live with my old lady.”

About fornication:

“They’re just performing natural acts.”

My Church was not actively looking for Hippies to play at guitar masses. A few religious got the “peace and love” feeling from the few Hippie types who still had some sincere love of God. The vast majority of the Hippies wanted to “do their own thing.” Smoke dope, have sex with their girlfriend, and most of all, to not be looked down upon.

Even the local barber, after seeing my long hair, said: “I don’t give haircuts to no Hippies.”

Too many of us were too young and too naive to understand what was really going on. In the early 1970s, a Head Shop opened in my neighborhood. Head stood for Dope Head. They sold “roach clips” to help you smoke your joint. Black light posters and underground newspapers that introduced you to anarchism, Marxism, hating corporations and other un-Biblical things. Rip off the corporations. Eat the rich. One encouraged “phone phreaking” to steal from those rich corporations. Power to the People!

And dirty, filthy underground comix that promoted perverted sex and images of dope trips. Pretty soon, there were Hippies in the movies and on the radio, like Cheech and Chong. We did not understand because we trusted the wrong people, but the damage was done and persists to this day. And it’s still all about sex.

Cheech and Chong - a couple of stoned Hippies.

Jay and Silent Bob - same thing for a new generation but add profanity and more explicit sexual references.

Peace,
Ed
 
bilop said:
… to long-haired hippy types playing guitars at Mass…
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Wow. And imagine the scandal when those “long haired hippies” started bring all kinds of depravity to the mass before. Things like brass instruments, strings, choirs, and even the new concept of Gregorian Chant. Also, don’t forget rennaisance art! Scandal.

Life is change. I sincerely doubt that guitars caused gays to start to want to get married, or women wanting to get ordained.
 
rep140 said:
I’ll offer a different perspective, at least as it pertains to the U.S. The Catholic Church here
was really an ethnic culture. Within 2 or 3 city blocks you would find the Polish church, then Italian, German, Irish, etc. The parish and community were one. However, after WWII the G.I. Bill allowed a lot of people to get better educated, get better jobs, make more money, and get a better house in the suburbs. Catholic Americans lost their ethnic identity and in many cases this is what really bound them to the Church.

The challenge to the Church is how to make the Faith relevant to people when you no longer have the ethnic tie. I really don’t think that the current state of the Church has much to do with V2.
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All the various ethnic groups you mention had a deep faith which is what bound them to the Church, not their ethnicity. In my community, we had Poles, Germans, White Russians, French, English, Italians and Russians. We did not all go to the same Church. There was a Polish National Church, for example. We all worshipped the same God. Our ethnic background was very important.

The suburbs, the education and the better paying jobs did not cause anyone to lose their ethnic identity. I spoke with a Polish man from Poland about six months ago. I asked him how he liked this country. He said, If I didn’t like it I could always go back to Poland. A local Church had a parish member in traditional ethnic clothing attend Mass. Ethnic identity is given up only voluntarily.

Too much trust placed in the media and giant corporations that put a McDonald’s in every city was part of the cause. America is too homogenized in places. No one is stopping anyone of any ethnic background to reestablish traditions.

Peace,
Ed
 
Whitacre_Girl said:
Wow. And imagine the scandal when those “long haired hippies” started bring all kinds of depravity to the mass before. Things like brass instruments, strings, choirs, and even the new concept of Gregorian Chant. Also, don’t forget rennaisance art! Scandal.

Life is change. I sincerely doubt that guitars caused gays to start to want to get married, or women wanting to get ordained.
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Catholic life is not change. It means obedience which includes why we are to be obedient. The dissidents in the 1960s caused the trouble.

Peace,
Ed
 
Whitacre_Girl said:
Wow. And imagine the scandal when those “long haired hippies” started bring all kinds of depravity to the mass before. Things like brass instruments, strings, choirs, and even the new concept of Gregorian Chant.
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There was no scandal with the introduction of Gregorian Chant. I would highly suggest reading Pope Pius XII’s encyclical “Music Sacrae (on Sacred Music)” which I have quoted and linked to below. Not all music is created equal when it comes to use in the Mass.
  1. The choral chant began to be called “Gregorian” after St. Gregory, the man who revived it. It attained new beauty in almost all parts of Christian Europe after the 8th or 9th century because of its accompaniment by a new musical instrument called the “organ.” Little by little, beginning in the 9th century, polyphonic singing was added to this choral chant. The study and use of polyphonic singing were developed more and more during the centuries that followed and were raised to a marvelous perfection under the guidance of magnificent composers during the 15th and 16th centuries.
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  1. Since the Church always held this polyphonic chant in the highest esteem, it willingly admitted this type of music even in the Roman basilicas and in pontifical ceremonies in order to increase the glory of the sacred rites. Its power and splendor were increased when the sounds of the organ and other musical instruments were joined with the voices of the singers.
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  1. Thus, with the favor and under the auspices of the Church the study of sacred music has gone a long way over the course of the centuries. In this journey, although sometimes slowly and laboriously, it has gradually progressed from the simple and ingenuous Gregorian modes to great and magnificent works of art. To these works not only the human voice, but also the organ and other musical instruments, add dignity, majesty and a prodigious richness.
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ewtn.com/library/ENCYC/P12MUSIC.HTM
 
God and Truth doesn’t change…regardless of society do so…The Church does not and should not change to conform to modern beliefs that nearly all come from The Devil…you can have change…We had some hope and change when the country elected Obama…what a miserable and deplorable failure…See what change gets you…I’m sorry, but I have had enough change in my life…You want change, check out the local protestant churches…they can’t ever seem to make up their minds.
Whitacre_Girl said:
Life is change. I sincerely doubt that guitars caused gays to start to want to get married, or women wanting to get ordained.
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I was younger at the time of Vatican II. Vatican II changed everything as far as I could see.
The Altar changed, All of a sudden the Beautiful altar was not allowed to be used. The same altar we honored , now discarded and irrelevant. Singing hymns in church. I remember the priest walking up and down the aisle encouraging people to sing, which they did uncomfortably. I thought it was like a protestant church. Saints? what Saints? St Christopher etc demoted. Communion in the hands? What? I thought the host was consecrated and a holy thing only touchable by the priests, now any one could touch it. Nuns walking around without habits or “Modern” habits without outward symbols of vocation like rosaries. There were more changes too numerous to mention Let me tell you it was a confusing time.
Basically everything that you had learned was now open to question because of the iconoclastic way in which things were implemented. Really, Is it any wonder so many Catholics started questioning papal pronouncements when their learned absolutes were not so absolute anymore and in shambles.We were told basically, “Tough, that’s the way it is now.”
I believe as a direct result many Catholics fell away. Some came back, some never did.
I think that the current trend of “Cafeteria” and non participating Catholics is a direct result of Vatican II. I can only speak from my experience but I saw many of my elders who had been faithful lifelong in every way being stunned, dismayed and alienated by the forced changes. Eventually I was watching them withdraw from active participation in Parish activities and going to Mass less frequently. It was not just the older ones who started questioning things, the younger ones did too.

It was sad. There were many who felt robbed of their traditions and betrayed by their Church. The damage they did to people. “For who, For what?”
I know it’s just my opinion, and it’s near impossible to adequately hash it out on these forums. I do think however that whether it was Liberation Theology, declining vocations, sex abuse scandals, renegade apostate theologians, Priests leaving to marry, every time I see negative stuff happening in the news about the RCC, the blame can be traced to Vatican II.
 
The blame cannot be placed on Vatican II.

The changes this poster speaks of were not as he claims. I was in Catholic school. Everything was explained to us. We still had Stations of the Cross. We still observed Holy Days as we always did.

A few small radical groups and individuals within the Church took advantage of Catholics and Christians in general during this time period. It was not the Fault of Vatican II.

The primary concern of the anarchists, the Hippies and the radical feminists was the destruction of the traditional family through addiction to the flesh. After the Hippies disappeared, porn bookstores, strip clubs and abortion were legalized. That was the problem. And mandatory sex education.

Kids were no longer taught Civics. That type of education that taught you how to be a good citizen and the duties of citizenship. This became the new mantra:

“Hey man. If it feels good, do it.”

God forbid.

Ed
 
Whitacre_Girl said:
Life is change. I sincerely doubt that guitars caused gays to start to want to get married, or women wanting to get ordained.
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That’s the problem, the Church is NOT change. It’s truths never change.

By changing the externals (the form of the Mass, music, the dress of the religious) you made people think everything was up for change. They didn’t distinguish between things that can change, and dogma that can’t.

So they started thinking, well if the Church can change the Holy Mass it has used for 500-1000 years, it can, and, will, and should change on divorce, and contraception, and gay marriage, and women “priests”.

When Catholics most needed stability is the face of social turmoil, the Church gave them anarchy. The combination of an ill timed Council, a bunch of modernists heretics (both clergy and laity) and two consecutive weak Popes made for a disaster.

The Church still suffers for it. Millions of souls were likely lost as a result. A great tragedy.

God Bless
 
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