What REALLY brought about the changes after Vatican 2?

[CarolsDaughter]

As a non-Catholic, this always puzzled me. I grew up in the 1960s and remember seeing nuns that still looked and acted like nuns (think: Sound of Music nuns)…I remember that Catholics used Latin (half my family is Catholic, and from what I can tell, all of them left the church after Vatican 2 enacted all the changes.)

Hence, my only real exposure to Catholcism is the pre-V2 version, which is fine with me (based on some of the weirdness I’ve seen of the post-V2 Catholicism, on TV, from talking to pro-life movement friends, etc)

Many Catholics don’t realize this, but those of us non-Catholics who are older and who remember the tail end of the normal Catholic church, kinda miss the old church too!

I remember my grandmom telling me about the Movie code, the index of forbidden books, incense with a High Mass, and I remember the calendars she had with little red fishies on every Friday, too.

When the Catholic church collapsed after V2, it seems society as a whole did too.

I realize this is all sentimentality with me (since I’m not Catholic and do not share your theology), but its not just some of you older Catholics that misses this stuff.

 

[buffalo]

Being a Protestant you might not like what this book shows. But here goes anyway.

LIBERALISM IS A SIN

…
I believe we can say with good historical accuracy that the Catholic moral customs inherited from centuries of Catholic and Roman civilization survived until the decade of the 1960’s, when the rot of Liberalism—spread at an accelerated rate by the immoral movie industry—had prepared the social seedbed for people finally to abandon the traditional Catholic moral customs. This abandonment of order for hedonism and personal licentiousness was precipitated during the 1960’s, more than anything else, I believe, by the advent of the birth control pill, accompanied by the utter daring of the movie industry in portraying on the screen people actually committing fornication and adultery. The result over the next few years was a general disintegration of sexual morality, pandemic infidelity, a meteoric rise in divorce, and finally, the coup de grace for society, abortion. Top this all off with the concomitant alarming increase in drug abuse, and the rest of human morals simply disintegrated in the train.
This historical scenario we have actually witnessed in just the past 30 years! The discussion here, therefore, is not academic. For the collapse of Catholic customs has taken place only recently, and that within the lifetimes of many of us. The result—if not soon reversed—will destroy what is left of our civilization.

 

[CarolsDaughter]

Being a Protestant you might not like what this book shows. But here goes anyway.

LIBERALISM IS A SIN

…
I believe we can say with good historical accuracy that the Catholic moral customs inherited from centuries of Catholic and Roman civilization survived until the decade of the 1960’s, when the rot of Liberalism—spread at an accelerated rate by the immoral movie industry—had prepared the social seedbed for people finally to abandon the traditional Catholic moral customs. This abandonment of order for hedonism and personal licentiousness was precipitated during the 1960’s, more than anything else, I believe, by the advent of the birth control pill, accompanied by the utter daring of the movie industry in portraying on the screen people actually committing fornication and adultery. The result over the next few years was a general disintegration of sexual morality, pandemic infidelity, a meteoric rise in divorce, and finally, the coup de grace for society, abortion. Top this all off with the concomitant alarming increase in drug abuse, and the rest of human morals simply disintegrated in the train.
This historical scenario we have actually witnessed in just the past 30 years! The discussion here, therefore, is not academic. For the collapse of Catholic customs has taken place only recently, and that within the lifetimes of many of us. The result—if not soon reversed—will destroy what is left of our civilization.

I’m not a Protestant, I’m a Jew.BTW that link looks very interesting, and sounds like it will explain everything.

It might interest you to know, though, that it seems that ALL formerly traditional religions have been infected by the disease of liberalism. Fortunately in Judaism, Orthodox Judaism has remained unharmed, but we have to tolerate “reform judaism” and its other offshoots, which are akin to the “novus ordo church” of Catholicism, or the Unitarian church in Protestantism.

Liberalism has made inroads EVERYWHERE, and traditional people of all religious persuasions need to root it out.

 

[buffalo]

I’m not a Protestant, I’m a Jew.BTW that link looks very interesting, and sounds like it will explain everything.

It might interest you to know, though, that it seems that ALL formerly traditional religions have been infected by the disease of liberalism. Fortunately in Judaism, Orthodox Judaism has remained unharmed, but we have to tolerate “reform judaism” and its other offshoots, which are akin to the “novus ordo church” of Catholicism, or the Unitarian church in Protestantism.

Liberalism has made inroads EVERYWHERE, and traditional people of all religious persuasions need to root it out.

I am sorry for assuming you to be Protestant.

Yes, liberalism is a plague that has infected everything.

 

[Cathryn]

The Catholic Church is still here. But, there is a battle going on. From within and from without, the Church is under attack. Jesus Christ told us this is how it would be. This is why us Catholics pray to St. Michael the Archangel to defend us in battle, to be our protection from the wickedness and snares of the devil. This is a spiritual battle for souls. The secular humanists want all the world to believe there is no God and no Satan___humanity saves itself. Jesus Christ promised to be with HIs Church to the end of time. He is with us body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Holy Eucharist. The Church is His Body. He also let us know how we win the battle in the end. I have been told that it takes at least a hundred years for the Church to settle down and assimilate an Ecumenical Council.

God Bless you.

 

[brotherhrolf]

Hi, CarolsDaughter! I was in high school (1965 - 1969) when we made the transition from the TLM to the NO. I was an altar boy from 1960 through 68. At 56, I am still not certain about the reasons things changed so dramatically but I do have some ideas.

Part of it was society in general - the Civil Rights Movement, the Hippie Movement, the protests from the Civil Rights Movement, the Viet Nam War…all of these things were going on at the same time.

Within the Church, if you read the documents, the NO was supposed to be in Latin. All across the US the Church could not shed Latin fast enough. Every two months or so it was announced from the pulpit that this or that would be changed and we would no longer use Latin.

In 1967, the Brothers that taught me abandoned their cassocks in favor of white shirts, black pants, and black tie. The Sisters abandoned their habits.

In 1968 my senior class in high school abandoned Latin and began with the guitars. Oh, how I hated that! I did not want to sing a’strummin’ and a’grinin’ hootenany style hymns but I was forced to. And then, yes, we sang Simon and Garfunkle’s “Sounds of Silence” and “Bridge over Troubled Waters” at my high school graduation Mass - both were still being played on radio stations.

In 1970 we “officially” went to the NO although in most parishes in the US the NO was in place by 68. At my home parish, out went the electronic organ installed in 1967 and in came the guitars with the a’strummin’ and a’grinnin’. We stopped going to the 10 am(ostensibly High Mass). We began going to the 8 am Mass with no guitars. They brought the a’strummin’ and a’grinnin’ hymns to the 8 am Mass and we retreated to the vigil Mass on Saturday.

We were schnookered. My parent’s generation and myself were raised to accept authority. The thought of protest was inconceivable back then. Because we did not protest, it was assumed that all of the changes were hunky-dory. They were not. I have driven 25 miles over the last 25 years to attend a reverent NO cathedral parish. In our first house we had a Catholic Church two miles away. In this, our second house, our geographic parish is five miles away.

I believe that the Holy Father recognized that there were a whole bunch of us left out in the cold. I attend a reverent NO parish where our choir routinely sings in Latin. Is it so much to ask that one weekend a month there is a Solemn High Mass?

 

[ProVobis]

Many Catholics don’t realize this, but those of us non-Catholics who are older and who remember the tail end of the normal Catholic church, kinda miss the old church too!

I think it was a petition signed by Agatha Christie and others and accepted by the Pope that actually preserved the traditional Catholic Mass. It does show that most like the fact that tradition is preserved and not necessarily within their own cultures or religion. A very nice post, by the way.

 

[misterbee]

Wha? You miss the Traditional Latin Mass even though it called for the conversion of Jews? I thought all Jewish people were irreparably hurt by those prayers…

I’ll now take my tongue out of my cheek.

Seriously, though, I really enjoyed reading this post. I had never thought about how the changes affected other denominations, let alone other faiths entirely. Thank you.

 

[CarolsDaughter]

Wha? You miss the Traditional Latin Mass even though it called for the conversion of Jews? I thought all Jewish people were irreparably hurt by those prayers…

I’ll now take my tongue out of my cheek.

Seriously, though, I really enjoyed reading this post. I had never thought about how the changes affected other denominations, let alone other faiths entirely. Thank you.

The TLM did not call for the conversion of the Jews, only the Good Friday version did.

Wait, just realized you were joking. LOL!

As a Jew who remembers the tail end of life before V2 (sort of), it just annoys me that V2 couldn’t just get rid of all the antisemitic stuff in the RCC, and keep the nice stuff, like the Tridentine Mass!

 

[CarolsDaughter]

I guess because I’m a Jew I can get away with saying some of this stuff here (I’m sure the new church people would be jumping all over me if I were Catholic, lol).

I’m a very traditionally-minded person, in many ways. I believe in traditional gender roles, traditional dress (regardless of religion)…in fact even though I am not strictly Orthodox as a Jew, I hang out primarily with Chasidic Jews BECAUSE they have not changed either their theology or their dress in perhaps 500 years and actually more. I just don’t like change.

I remember nuns as a kid that looked like nuns, another thing I miss. I remember priests in long cassocks and nuns in full habits–they’d go through our neighborhood, visiting the Catholic families. One of the nuns back then was especially nice to me when she saw me crying on our front porch after my dog died.

Recently my mother was in a Catholic hospital, and the chaplain there was a modern nun. She came to see my mother (she visits all patients, Catholic and non-Catholic), and I was just really turned off at how she was dressed, and she introduced herself to me as “Sister Marge”. And I’m thinking, “What happened to the full habit and the Sister Maria Annunziata”? KWIM?

I think a lot of non-Catholics lost respect for your church because you did all this changing around. I know I did…its why in my mind I still think of the Catholic church as being only the pre-V2 one.

 

[JMBNH]

Most of the serious Catholics my age (I’m 22) are more conservative leaning and so the Church will take swing back that way, as most of the liberals either pack in or run off to pop culture churches where all they get is 45 minutes Christian rock songs, about 3 Bible verses and a feel good sermon, with not even a pseudo-Eucharist. Then again the Sister we have at Church is liberal and does things like yoga and Buddhist meditation, though our Priest is a good conservative one doctrinally, and has scared off most of the liberals I think, though Mass is quite low in practice except for on special feasts (I sometimes go to the Latin High Mass at a parish nearby though that’s about 3 miles and I don’t drive so a long walk, plus most of the people I know go to the local one and the Priest is very good). One of my bigger problems with the post Vatican 2 stuff is that even though it merely says it is possible for Protestants (and Jews and Muslims) to be saved it gets turned into Protestants just being seen as other Churches which is wrong and not what Vatican 2 said (I don’t have the same problem with Orthodox seen as ither real Churches as they basically are just sadly outside Full Communion with the Catholic Church)

 

[brotherhrolf]

I particularly miss our traditions. Lord knows I’ve tried to instill them in my sons.

 

[sphilomena]

I guess because I’m a Jew I can get away with saying some of this stuff here (I’m sure the new church people would be jumping all over me if I were Catholic, lol).

I’m a very traditionally-minded person, in many ways. I believe in traditional gender roles, traditional dress (regardless of religion)…in fact even though I am not strictly Orthodox as a Jew, I hang out primarily with Chasidic Jews BECAUSE they have not changed either their theology or their dress in perhaps 500 years and actually more. I just don’t like change.

I remember nuns as a kid that looked like nuns, another thing I miss. I remember priests in long cassocks and nuns in full habits–they’d go through our neighborhood, visiting the Catholic families. One of the nuns back then was especially nice to me when she saw me crying on our front porch after my dog died.

Recently my mother was in a Catholic hospital, and the chaplain there was a modern nun. She came to see my mother (she visits all patients, Catholic and non-Catholic), and I was just really turned off at how she was dressed, and she introduced herself to me as “Sister Marge”. And I’m thinking, “What happened to the full habit and the Sister Maria Annunziata”? KWIM?

I think a lot of non-Catholics lost respect for your church because you did all this changing around. I know I did…its why in my mind I still think of the Catholic church as being only the pre-V2 one.

It is wonderful to hear your perspective. I believe Catholics and conservative Jews have more in common in some ways, than we do with other non-Catholics. The Jews are to me, my spiritual ancestors. Rosalind Moss is still connected with Catholic Answers, as far as I know, and has a beautiful testimony. She relates going to Mass and seeing the parallels with Jewish worship.

I have enjoyed reading your posts, Carol’sDaughter, since the one on what happened with your mother. You seem to appreciate our traditions more than some Catholics do! Blessings to you!

 

[collegepak]

All of Vatican II is garbage. They are trying to make a pluralized all encompassing, Pantheistic version of God. from the public perspective, Vatican II was cleverly portrayed to be more pragmatic, but it is a precursor to pure natural law. The Church is screwed, and thats why Jesus has to come back.