Not “the Silly Season” but “the Satanic Season”

On those who underestimate the evils of the immediate post-Council

Preliminary note: As you may imagine, I correspond with a lot of people around the world, and receive a huge number of emails. Often these communications contains fascinating and important historical information. The following letter from a reader is, for reasons that will become quickly apparent, well worth sharing as widely as possible for the background it furnishes, especially for the large number of Catholics who were not alive during the 1960s and who have no idea how bad it was. In particular, there is a tendency among Catholic conservatives nowadays to soft-pedal the evils of the Council’s aftermath, as if to accuse traditionalists of exaggeration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without delay, let’s dive in.—PAK

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I have just finished reading three of your books—Close the Workshop, Turned Around, and The Once and Future Roman Rite. All were excellent. Close the Workshop in particular is very useful because it really gets to the specifics at the heart of the matter. I’m planning to purchase extra copies just so I can give them to the many “liturgical ignoramuses” I meet. (Getting them to read through the book will probably involve an extra novena or two on my part and perhaps even a pilgrimage to Lourdes.) I’ve been listening to your various interviews on YouTube and especially enjoyed the lengthy one with Matt Fradd (Pints with Aquinas), which was particularly good and informative, as was the moderated discussion with Dr. Larry Chapp about the theological background, implementation, and effects of Vatican II.

About 25 years ago, I read through Michael Davies’ books on the liturgical revolution, which were recommended to me by a priest who was a friend of our family’s (one of the “old-fashioned” orthodox and TLM-loving kind who were basically shunned and “cancelled” everywhere during the 70s, 80s, and 90s). During some podcasts, I want to yell out at the screen: “You’re forgetting to say what actually happened to people after the great liturgical changes that were made between 1964 and 1969!”

Let me tell you about what happened to my family here and in Holland. Catholics in Holland referred to this as: De grote Verwarring—the great confusion—something quite a bit more serious in meaning than the somewhat facile characterization typically used by Bishop Barron and Dr. Chapp, “the silly season.” Let me tell you what happened to nearly 70% of the Catholic faithful in Europe and North America and why they left the Church.

I’m writing this to give a bit more “background” about this part of the Novus Ordo story; in some ways it’s comparable to what happened during the Covid pandemic—there was a tremendous amount of utterly unnecessary societal upheaval, but the government agencies who were responsible have yet to (and likely never will) utter a word by way of apology. Likewise, the Church today is in a similar situation.

I think it’s necessary to provide some background about myself in order for my recollections about what historians have called “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (what actually happened) to make sense.

Born in 1957, I am a typical Baby Boomer who grew up in Vancouver, B.C., as a first generation child of Roman Catholic Dutch immigrants who came to Canada shortly after WWII. Our family was not really overly strict, but rather, because of the sobering events experienced by my parents during the War, perpetually wary, distrustful, and suspicious of most of the liberalizing cultural tendencies present everywhere during the 1960s and 1970s. My father worked as an engineer at UBC and had spent most of the war in a German forced labor camp. My mom lived in a small farmhouse—one of fourteen girls, three of whom became professed nuns!—and my mom’s only younger brother became a Mill Hill Missionary and lifelong theologian in London, England, educated at Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. Mom worked as a midwife during the war years while the houses next door to her were occupied by the German Wehrmacht.