How Is Vatican II Perceived by Faithful Catholics?

The Professor's Bookshelf #8: A short, fine book with a lot of galvanizing realism

Preliminary note: A question I’m frequently asked is: “What book would you recommend for getting up to speed on the whole business of Vatican II?” Naturally, the answer depends on how deep a dive one is looking for. Roberto de Mattei’s The Second Vatican Council—An Unwritten Story is ambitious and eye-opening, but it’s also over 600 pages. Henry Sire’s Phoenix from the Ashes is a superbly rewarding read, though it covers much more than Vatican II. Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s Christus Vincit ranges widely over many topics, from the last Council to the liturgical reform to the highs and lows of the papacy to more recent troubles. Any of these books would be worth every bit of time one might give to it.

However, back in 2022, I edited a pithy and punchy collection of the best writing from conservative and traditionalist authors on the sixtieth anniversary of the Council’s opening: Sixty Years After: Catholic Writers Assess the Legacy of Vatican II (also at Angelico and Amazon). I like the book because the chapters are short and to the point, expressing with a high degree of clarity the various reasonable positions one might take on the phenomenon and consequences of the Council. For example, you get positive takes from Larry Chapp and George Weigel, but you also get sharp critiques from journalists and theologians, e.g., Ross Douthat, Fr Claude Barthe, Gregory DiPippo, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Fr John Perricone, Eric Sammons, and others. I myself have a substantial chapter in the book detailing the reasons I am a Vatican II skeptic. The fact that authors are often responding to one another makes the book lively. The whole thing comes in at 178 pages.

Today, I’ll share a number of my favorite passages that I marked as I was reviewing the page proofs. —PAK

Christian Browne

The Council did not achieve its ends…and its bizarre and disastrous “implementation” cannot be separated from its history. Although a factually inaccurate conflation, the Council by now has been nearly identified with the Novus Ordo and all the changes to Catholic life and practice that came in its wake.

Thus, the defense of Council’s commencement, its documents, or what this or that bishop really said, retains at this point only an intellectual appeal; as a practical matter these sorts of points mean nothing, because they came to nothing. We know that the Council did not order the elimination of Latin in the Mass and the implementation of Communion in the hand. We get it. But these things happened after the Council and were done in its name. The present pope and his curial officials invoke the Council as the infallible authority for all that has come after it. To question or critique these postconciliar practices is to reject the Council, we are told!

Sadly, the defense of the Council per se, therefore, becomes nothing more than an effort at historical accuracy. It tries to explain (usually in the best light possible) why the Council was thought necessary and the lofty goals of (some) of its participants, but it has almost zero practical application for the resolution of the roiling crisis that the Council unleashed. (13-14)

When I was awakened to the Faith at the age of fourteen, I knew nothing about Vatican II or the Latin Mass. But from the first, I felt instinctively that something was amiss in the Church that I loved. I saw the great and unused marble altar affixed to the wall of our high school chapel with a Latin inscription above it; I saw old yearbook photos of the many Jesuits in their cassocks; the boys kneeling at the daily Mass; the emphasis on classical learning; the Sodality of Our Lady. I knew, by a sort of sensus fidelium, that the guitars and the hand-holding and the felt banners and the bad hymns were alien to the Church. (14)

I do not subscribe to the ideological effort to suppress reality, for it is this effort that prevents the Church from fairly and justly judging its past—praising what is praiseworthy, but discarding that which is harmful or the product of false and misplaced hopes. (14)

The allure of progress is powerful, but, like the unclean spirit gone out of the man only to return with seven more, it can leave its object in worse condition than that in which it was found. (15)

Philip Campbell

At a certain point I realized—as many of us have—that the progressives don’t care what Vatican II said. They don’t view the Council as a series of teachings; rather, they view it as an event. And not just any event, but an event whose nature is metahistorical. It is not merely another step in the long path of historical development; it is a paradigm-shattering upheaval that breaks the fourth wall of history, purporting not only to change the historical trajectory of the Church but to remove the Church entirely from the bounds of history and tradition. What do people with such lofty visions, such grandiose pretensions, care about the precise definition of participatio actuosa, the rubrics of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, or any other considerations that are merely textual? (19-20)

There is no more useless endeavor than to search for “the real Vatican II.” One has a better chance finding the Fountain of Youth or the Ark of the Covenant. That’s because there is no “real Vatican II” that can be found by documentary analysis alone, and it is a most fruitless search to think otherwise. Vatican II can’t be found solely in the documents any more than the French Revolution can be found by reading the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (22)

Larry Chapp

The council fathers understood that the often legalistic and superficial “contractual Catholicism” of the Church of that time had led to an infantilized laity who tended to view the whole enterprise as an effort in “following the rules” established by the hierarchy. (29)

To which I reply: well—have we escaped that? Really? Catholics who haven’t left are still just as tempted by legalism and by slavish turn-a-blind-eye obedience.

Second, there is the traditionalist view, growing in popularity, that the Council, though not in explicit doctrinal error, was nevertheless riddled with ambiguities. These ambiguities were caused by the need for compromise between the warring conciliar factions which allowed enough loopholes to exist for the aforementioned progressive takeover of the postconciliar interpretive spin to succeed. Furthermore, since the Council was by its own self-definition meant to be a pastoral Council, the disaster that followed can only mean that the conciliar project was, by definition, a failure. (31-32)

But this is obviously correct: it’s not a “view.” All the serious historians of the Council have documented it.

John Daniel Davidson

In making his argument this way, Weigel tries to eat his cake and have it too. Every positive development in Catholicism since 1965 is because of Vatican II; every distortion or pathology is a misapplication of Vatican II. He cannot admit that perhaps there was something about the Second Vatican Council that invited the pathologies and ruptures, that so far from a legacy of a renewed Catholicism, the legacy of Vatican II is one of deep division within the faith and a weakening of the church’s authority in the eyes of a watching world. That maybe, after all, it was not worth it. Why is it, for example, that the truth about Jesus Christ proposed by the Catholic Church resonates most powerfully today when the Church speaks in its ancient, pre-Vatican II voice? (39)

These families and converts are not being drawn to the Catholic Church and devoting themselves in ever-growing numbers to its most ancient forms of worship because the postconciliar church became more global, or because there is now a greater role for women and laity in the cele- bration of the Mass, or because Vatican II urged Catholics to read the Bible more. They are the future of the Catholic Church,5 and they owe the expressions of their faith more to the reforms of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent than to the twentieth-century Second Vatican Council.

If Weigel cannot see why these Catholics are drawn to the light and beauty of the ancient faith amid the wreckage of a dying civilization, then I hazard to say he has painted himself into a corner. Having convinced himself that something was profoundly wrong with the Catholic Church in the immediate post-war years, he must contend that the harsh medicine of Vatican II was the only cure. But sixty years later, it is hard not to conclude that the cure was worse than the disease, that it was in fact a slow-working poison, and that harsher medicine will yet be required to cure what ails the Church today. (40-41)

Gregory DiPippo

Just as the bishops who attended Constance did not bother to attend the next council which they themselves had called for, the bishops who wrote (with their periti) and approved the documents of Vatican II seemed afterwards to care little or nothing for what they had written…. I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why I or anyone else should show an enthusiasm for the texts of Vatican II which their own authors never showed. (49)

Michael Brendan Dougherty

For modernist Catholics, Vatican II was the one true event, one that transformed Catholicism as it had been understood and practiced for centuries into Pharisaism and then tried to redirect Christian energies into deconstructing the old church. (60)

Ross Douthat

The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike—but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest….

And if anything, post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed with its endless right-versus left battles, and to the extent it engaged with the secular world, it was in paltry imitation—via middling guitar music or political theories that were just dressed-up versions of left-wing or right-wing partisanship or ugly modern churches that were outdated ten years after they were built and empty soon thereafter. (65)

Even if the council’s changes did not officially alter doctrine, to rewrite and renovate so many prayers and practices inevitably made ordinary Catholics wonder why an authority that suddenly declared itself to have been misguided across so many different fronts could still be trusted to speak on behalf of Jesus Christ himself. (66)

For most people, Catholic faith isn’t an idea you’ve chosen that then has corollaries in practice (like get to Mass on Sunday). It’s an inheritance that you get handed and have to decide what to do with…. The church is in competition with a million other urgent-seeming things, and in its post-Vatican II form it has often failed to establish the importance of its own rituals and obligations…. Decline continues because of cultural priorities rather than beliefs. (69-70)

What really breeds cynicism is when the church behaves like the Soviet empire in its dotage and demands constant encomiums to the wisdom and success of a now decades-old renewal project, when everyone can plainly see it’s presiding over crisis and decline. (73)

Matthew Hazell

Hazell’s contribution consists in a translation, with commentary, of a speech given at Vatican II by Cardinal Montini (the future Paul VI) on October 22, 1962, concerning the liturgy. Here are some choice excerpts:

We must not forget Saint Paul’s eloquent teachings in 1 Corinthians 14, that is to say, he affirms that he who prays in the Church must understand with his mind what he utters with his mouth, and must answer “Amen” knowing what he is saying. The Liturgy was instituted for men, not men for the Liturgy. It is the prayer of the Christian community; if we desire that this community not abandon our temples, but that they may willingly approach them, and there have the interior life of the soul formed and express their faith worthily, the hindrance of a language that cannot be understood, or is appropriate for only a very few, must be removed, prudently, but without delay or hesitation. Whatever does not attract our people to participate in divine worship but alienates them from it is to be examined, as is excellently stated in n. 24 of the constitution. (92)

My comment: the supreme irony! Today we have packed TLM communities not only willing but eager to go to “their temples,” e.g., Catholic churches, for the supposedly inaccessible Latin liturgy that, in fact, has nourished their interior life—and now church authorities are trying to violently take it away from them. So much for pastoral care!

Likewise, the principle of reducing ceremonies to a simpler form seems commendable to me, not in order to diminish the beauty and rich meaning of worship, but to ensure that the brevity of the ceremonies may be properly considered and that repetitions and all complications be avoided; the liturgical reform here announced is supported by this principle, very appropriate and in keeping with the character of the men of our age, even pious and faithful ones. (92)

Stripping away, denuding in the name of transparency, never did spark enduring romance; it’s more likely to provoke boredom or disgust, or, at best, a short-sighted utilitarianism.

Jean-Pierre Maugendre

All this was imposed with an unheard-of brutality. This brutality was certainly in opposition to the official discourse on “listening, openness, dialogue, respect for others, and the acceptance of differences,” but it was necessary because all these upheavals did not in any way respond to the demands of the Catholic faithful themselves. (125)

While it is fashionable to denounce clericalism, the years following the Council were primarily those of unbridled clericalism…. “The evangelization of those who were far away could be done only after the eviction of all those who were only falsely close.” (126)

Maugendre quotes a Protestant historian who wrote in 1975:

“An important part of the clergy of France constitutes today a social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual sub-proletariat; of the great tradition of the Church this fraction has often kept only its clericalism, intolerance, and fanaticism. These men reject a heritage that crushes them, because they are intellectually incapable of understanding it and spiritually incapable of living it.” (131)

John Pepino

Causes of decline:

The discrepancy between “official Catholicism” after Vatican II and traditional popular piety [is worthy of note]…. Some elements of the liturgy, while seeming secondary to intellectuals, are actually psychological and anthropological determinants. He mentions the abandonment of Latin, changing pronouns to address God (“Thou” vs. “you” in the English context), Communion in the hand, the minimization or scuttling of former obligations, and so forth. (137-38)

Changes in official teaching turn humble folk into skeptics. Indeed, an institution that admits to having been wrong yesterday may well be wrong today, too. In this respect, Cuchet focuses on the sudden silence in the pulpits (as tracked in parish bulletins giving the topic of the homily) regarding the four last things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell); it gave the impression that the clergy had either ceased to believe in them or no longer knew how to discuss them. (138)

More fundamentally, Cuchet speaks of “a collective exit from the culture of obligatory practice under pain of mortal sin.” (138)

The permission to anticipate Sunday by attending Mass on Saturday evenings participated in the desacralization of Sundays, whose focus now shifted to leisure (which the now widespread ownership of television sets and automobiles made that much more available). (139)

A whole complex of shared values, to some extent held together by a system of obligations indexed on a strong sense of the connection between religious practice and one’s eternal destiny, and incarnated in seasonal practices (recurring feasts and fasts, rites of passage), was the body of Catholicism, while the soul in this analogy was actual personal assent to the truths taught and, in fine, commitment to Christ. Many of what Cuchet calls the clergy’s “false good pastoral ideas” (i.e., good intentions with disastrous results) derive from the Platonic notion that separating the soul from the body would be to the former’s benefit. Instead, of course, death ensued, and our world stopped being Christian. (140)

George Weigel

The extraordinary growth of the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan Africa—where Catholicism now counts hundreds of millions of adherents, many of them first- or second-generation Christians—was accelerated by the council’s promotion of native African clergy and religious orders…. (154)

False statement: simple numbers, yes, but not proportion or rate of growth. In fact, the Church in Africa is falling behind the growth of Protestant and other kinds of sects, to which Catholics often defect. See the book I edited called Is African Catholicism a “Vatican II Success Story?” (Os Justi Press, 2025).

In 2022, the vibrant parts of a globalized Catholicism are those living John XXIII’s original intention for Vatican II as a council that would renew the Church for its mission of sanctifying an often claustrophobic, self-absorbed, and frightened world. (159)

This seems to admit that the original intention had not successfully imposed itself or had become derailed. Indeed, the best aspects of John XXIII were his traditional ones.

Thus the Council had many theological and doctrinal accomplishments to its credit. These were crucial to rekindling that radical, Christ-centered faith that would be the source of a revitalized Catholic mission to convert the modern world. Similarly, the Council’s rejection of Catholic triumphalism was good in itself and necessary for its mission: “It was both necessary and good for the Council to put an end to the false forms of the Church’s glorification of self on earth, and by suppressing her compulsive tendency to defend her past history, to eliminate her false justification of self.” (162)

In Christus Vincit (see page 126), Bishop Schneider shows that it was just the opposite: there was never a council in history that involved so much self-exaltation, so much navel-gazing, as Vatican II. It was, he says, an exercise in triumphalist clericalism.

Weigel cites Ratzinger:

“We must rediscover that luminous trail that is the history of the saints and of the beautiful—a history in which the joy of the Gospel has been irrefutably expressed throughout the centuries.”

Indeed. That is why we must adhere to the same traditions they did.

It [the world] would be converted by the Church offering more beauty than the world could manage to create. (163)

This is meant as a statement of why Vatican II was necessary. Yet there was 10,000 times more beauty to be found in the Church before Vatican II; and where beauty has returned, it has done so in decidedly traditional contexts. I don’t see how anyone can dispute this.

Where Catholicism is alive today, and Vatican II well-received and implemented, it is because local churches have embraced holiness and beauty as evangelical and catechetical pathways toward a Christocentric future. (163)

For example, trad communities…

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The foregoing excerpts are from Sixty Years After: Catholic Writers Assess the Legacy of Vatican II.