Judging a Tree by Its Fruits
After the Council opened the Church to the modern world, what future lay in store for parishes and seminaries?
Considering the consequences of the Council’s openness to the modern world for parishes and seminaries is not only for statisticians and sociologists. Considering the fruits necessarily implies wondering what tree produced them. It implies drawing a connection between effects and a cause. It implies considering a causal relation and therefore a responsibility.
And these considerations are those of a historian, a philosopher, a theologian, not a statistician or a sociologist. The latter consider how many and how, but rarely the why and the wherefore. They describe more than they explain. They make observations without seeking a cause, especially if it could look like an accusation or a search for who is responsible.
In this presentation of the way the Council opened the Church to the modern world and the influence this had on religious practice and the number of vocations, we will not disregard the facts and numbers, but we will not stop there. The facts are also effects and they have a cause, unless we believe in spontaneous generation…
Since a topic as delicate as establishing the causal relation, and therefore a responsibility and even culpability between the Council and its fruits puts us in a position to be accused of choosing sides or being “Traditionalist,” we shall simply cite the testimony of a convert from progressivism on the evolution in the Church since the Council. He will testify and the reader will be free to form his own opinion.
Eloquent numbers
Let us start with some official numbers; they are neither progressivist nor traditionalist, they are simply eloquent.
In France, in the middle of the 1960’s, 94% of a generation was baptized, 25% went to Mass every Sunday and 80% of children made their Solemn Communion. Today, about 2% of Catholics attend Sunday Mass (1.8% according to a survey by Ipsos for La Croix in 2017) and only about 30% of children are baptized before the age of seven.
In 1901, there were 1,733 priestly ordinations for the diocesan clergy, and in 1965, at the end of Vatican Council II, there were 646. In 2020, there were only 46 diocesan priests ordained, which forced the seminaries of Lille and Bordeaux to close. In 2021, based on the number of deacons in the seminaries, there will be 36 diocesan priests and 54 religious priests or members of priestly societies ordained.
La Verité des chiffres legitimately predicts that many dioceses will have to prepare to see their presbyterium go practically extinct, especially since the low number of ordinations is concentrated in just a few dioceses, essentially Paris, Versailles and Toulon.
Based on the statistics, the editor of La Vérité des chiffres points out two elements he believes to be absolutely essential to counter the drastic drop in priestly vocations: the sacramental life of families, and in particular, Confirmation around the age of six or seven, and the broadest possible recognition of the celebration of the traditional Mass.
Otherwise, comments Jean-Pierre Maugendre on the website Renaissance catholique, “the current trends look bound to continue,” for “the same causes produce the same effects [and de facto] there does not seem to be any major questioning of the principles that led to the present situation.”
He goes on to add that:
The question will inevitably arise as to whether to keep dioceses that are no longer anything more than administrative structures with no sacramental life, for lack of priests, and practically no Christian families, for lack of sacraments. But the future is in God’s hands. In 1976, Paul Vigneron, in his book Histoire des crises du clergé français contemporain (History of the Crises of the Contemporary French Clergy, Téqui 1976), called on the bishops, in the face of the oncoming disaster, “to simply and loyally try the methods of apostolate and spirituality that [they had] rejected, perhaps too boldly, thirty years earlier.” To do so, he remarked, they would have to “admit at last that [they had been] mistaken.”
In Germany, a country currently being affected by the application of an extremely progressivist “Synodal Way,” the increasing number of Catholics falling away is easy to count thanks to the church tax: those who no longer wish to pay it for one reason or another declare that they are no longer Catholic and are considered to have left the Church.
The July 10, 2020 issue of Augsburger Allgemeine reveals that in 2019, 272,771 faithful left the Catholic Church, which is 26% more than in 2018. This is no slow and imperceptible erosion; it is a significant disengagement.
Again, according to the same source, there were only 57 ordinations for the 27 dioceses of Germany in 2019, and last year there were 55. In the 60’s and 70’s, there were about 300 new priests every year; in 2000, there were 154. In other words, in 20 years, the number of priests ordained has dropped by 60%.
We could take these numbers as a fatality and simply recognize their reality, but that would scarcely be satisfying intellectually. We are therefore inclined to wonder why: what is the cause of this dizzying drop? Of course, it is impossible not to take into account the secularization of contemporary society, but does not the Council’s openness to this world and its modernity reveal that the Church herself has begun a process of self-secularization?
Can we see the facts without seeking their cause?
Going beyond simple statistics, sociologists have analyzed them and, without establishing a causal relation between the two, pointed out a “proximity” between the Council and the decline in religious practice. Without being the cause, Vatican II was supposedly a “trigger.”
Here is what Guillaume Cuchet says in Comment notre monde a cessé d’être chrétien (How Our World Ceased to Be Christian, Seuil, 2018); for him, the decline in religious practice did indeed begin as early as 1965, the year Vatican II ended:
We do not see any other contemporary event that could have caused such a reaction. The chronology shows that it was not only the way the Council was applied after it closed that cause this rupture. By its very existence, insofar as it suddenly made the reform of the former standards imaginable, the Council was enough to overturn them, especially since the liturgical reform affecting the most visible part for most people started being applied in 1964 (p. 130).
Without ever entering into what he calls “the traditionalist or fundamentalist debate,” Cuchet offers a prudent explanation:
In the realm of piety, certain aspects of the liturgical reform that may have seemed secondary but psychologically and anthropologically speaking were not, such as the use of the vernacular, the familiar tone used to address God, Communion in the hand, and the relativization of former obligations, played an important role (p. 134).
But he offers another explanation that directly involves one of the conciliar texts, the one on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (Dec. 7, 1965):
The text seemed like an unofficial permission to judge for oneself in matters of belief, behavior and practice. The fact is that this recent consecration of a sort of Catholic Aufklärung, according to Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment (as a freedom to think for oneself), contrasted strongly with the former regime. The theologian Louis Bouyer summed up the situation perfectly in 1968 with the sad phrase, “Each person now only believes and practices what he feels like” (p. 132-133).
In a word, the faithful took for their own personal use the “right of persons and communities to social and civil freedom in religious matters” that the Council proclaimed against all the former and constant teaching of the Church.
Another sociologist whose analysis is not without interest is Jérôme Fourquet, who in L’Archipel français, naissance d’une nation multiple et divisée (The French Archipelago, The Birth of a Multiple and Divided Nation, Seuil, 2019) remarks that France has become an archipelago, that is to say, a series of islands with little left in common because they lack the very idea of a common good. And when he wonders when exactly France became this “multiple and divided nation,” he answers—basing himself on G. Cuchet’s work—that it was when the “Catholic matrix” disappeared; after that, everything fell apart, becoming scattered like an archipelago. Various communities appeared, a Muslim community, a Jewish community, a Catholic community, an organic community, a vegan community, a homosexual community… But they ignore each other. They are side by side and no longer form a society, but rather a dissociety, to borrow the expression of the philosopher Marcel De Corte.
The influence of the liturgical reform and of the doctrine of religious liberty over the faithful and the disappearance of the Church’s role as a “matrix” in society are, according to these sociologists, the factors that make Vatican II a “trigger” of the crisis in religious practice and in vocations. But was it really only a “trigger”?
After the inter-religious declaration of Abu Dhabi (Feb. 4, 2019), cosigned by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, and after the idolatrous worship of the Pachamama in the Vatican Gardens on Oct. 4, 2019, theologians have admitted there is a clearer causal relation.
A Council that is responsible but not guilty?
In an article published on June 1, 2020 on LifeSiteNews, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan, declared that there is “no divine positive will or natural right to the diversity of religions” and he showed that the Declaration of Abu Dhabi was the logical consequence of the religious liberty promoted by Vatican Council II:
There is sufficient reason to suggest that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, and the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, signed by Pope Francis and Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb in Abu Dhabi, on February 4, 2019. On his return flight to Rome from the United Arab Emirates, Pope Francis himself told journalists: “There is one thing … I would like to say. I openly reaffirm this: from the Catholic point of view the Document does not move one millimeter away from the Second Vatican Council. It is even cited, several times. The Document was crafted in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.”1
The Kazakh prelate pointed out the rupture introduced by the conciliar declaration Dignitatis Humanae, which sets forth
a theory never before taught by the constant Magisterium of the Church, i.e., that man has the right founded in his own nature, “not to be prevented from acting in religious matters according to his own conscience, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits” (ut in re religiosa neque impediatur, quominus iuxta suam conscientiam agat privatim et publice, vel solus vel aliis consociatus, intra debitos limites, n. 2). According to this statement, man would have the right, based on nature itself (and therefore positively willed by God) not to be prevented from choosing, practicing and spreading, also collectively, the worship of an idol, and even the worship of Satan, since there are religions that worship Satan, for instance, the “church of Satan.” Indeed, in some countries, the “church of Satan” is recognized with the same legal value as all other religions.
In an article published on June 10, 2020 on Chiesa e post concilio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, approved Bishop Schneider’s analysis without sharing his opinion as to a possible solution to the present doctrinal crisis. He said the Council needs more than a correction; it needs to be condemned. He did, however, write,
The merit of [Bishop Schneider’s] essay lies first of all in its grasp of the causal link between the principles enunciated or implied by Vatican II and their logical consequent effect in the doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and disciplinary deviations that have arisen and progressively developed to the present day.2
The two prelates recognized a causal relation between the conciliar document on religious liberty and the inter-religious declaration of Abu Dhabi. Would this be enough to persuade the supporters of Vatican II that it was responsible for the present doctrinal and pastoral crisis? It would have been naïve to believe so.
For the fact of the matter is that despite its bitter fruits that have been thoroughly tasted, the Council does not wish to be judged by its effects but only by its ability to inspire dreams, its ability to answer contemporary utopias. It is noteworthy that Pope Francis does not hesitate to use the word “dream” repeatedly, and even ad nauseam.
In his exhortation Querida Amazonia (Feb. 12, 2020), he proposes no less than four dreams: a social dream, a cultural dream, an ecological dream and an ecclesial dream. In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti (Oct. 4, 2020), he declares,
Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth, which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all (§8).3
And in his book Let Us Dream (Simon and Schuster, Dec. 2020), he invites the reader to “Come, let us talk this over. Let us dare to dream…” Which Msgr. Benoist de Sinety translates in his presentation of the French version of the papal text as: the pope invites us “to dream not small, personal and self-sufficient dreams, but to dream together, to dream big.”
Dreams ignore the laws of real life. A dream scenario is completely emancipated from the principle of causality, and the effects in it have no proportionate cause. A dream tree is not to be judged by its fruits. And just as you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink, it is very difficult to bring back to reality a conciliar mind that wants to dream.
Which is why the testimony of a simple layman proves useful. He offers no sociological or philosophical or theological analysis, but simply common sense. The common sense that tells us there is no smoke without fire.
The testimony of a convert
Aldo Maria Valli is a journalist who specializes in religious issues. He comes from progressivism, having been close with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the archbishop of Milan who inspires Pope Francis. On July 12, 2020, he explained on his blog how he discovered Tradition. I will let him speak and only add as little as possible.
For many people of my generation (I was born in 1958), the Council was not a problem for decades: it was simply a fact. Born and raised in the post-conciliar Church, for a long time I saw the Council as something ineluctable: at a given time, the Church had to make certain choices. (…)
Now that I am getting older and feel the need to go to the essential of the Faith, it seems to me that I can say, in all humility and as a simple baptized Catholic, that the Council was inspired by a deadly mistake: the desire to please the world.
I realize that my declaration may seem hasty, and I apologize to the specialists in the matter, but the more I study the years of the Council, the more convinced I am that there was a sort of inferiority complex in large parts of the Church, beginning with John XXIII, with regards to the world, a world that, at the time, was in complete upheaval and seemed so alive. Hence the desire not to seem behind but to show a sympathetic side of the Church, in the literal sense of the word, sympathetic as in one who suffers with, who participates in the joys and pangs, avoiding any position of superiority or judgmental attitude.
I remember that when I used to speak of the Council with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the archbishop of Milan liked to use the expression “the Church of the Council as a Church of intercession.” Interceding, the cardinal would say, means walking in the middle, and that is what John XXIII wanted to do: walk in the middle of the world, without rising above or going ahead, but also without falling behind.
Martini used to say that for him, the Council was like opening the windows and letting fresh air into a church that smelled musty and moldy. That is exactly what he said, and I thought I saw them, those men of faith who, inspired by all those intellectual stimuli, passionately discussed theological and moral issues so that the word of the Gospel could once again shine in all its beauty and novelty, relieved of its pitfalls and inlays.
But, says, A. M. Valli,
the underlying problem remains, and I mentioned it earlier: the desire to please the world. Now I obviously do not wish to psychoanalyze the Council, but it is truly difficult not to get the impression that deep down, this need was there. Pope Roncalli’s optimism was that of someone who, tired of a Church lagging behind the world and considered as a sort of surly and hateful old aunt, wished her to be seen as a loving and gentle mother, trustworthy and welcoming. An understandable desire. Were it not for the fact that the minute the Church, more or less consciously, wishes to please the world, she inevitably begins to betray herself and to betray her mission. For Jesus never wished to please the world or lessen His standards to appear friendly and dialogue.
And indeed, St. Paul tells us, “Noli conformari huic saeculo—And be not conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2). That is how the Catholic identity disappears and the “Catholic matrix,” to borrow Jérôme Fourquet’s expression, disappears from society, leaving it to become an archipelago.
A. M. Valli goes on to explain,
With the Council, the windows were indeed opened, and the air came in. But along with a pleasant sensation of freshness came the ideas of the world, marked by sin, and the Church was contaminated.
What does “marked by sin” mean? In a word, it means marked by the desire to put man in God’s place, because deep down that is what it is today, that is what it was yesterday and that is what it has always been.
Of course, not everything began with the Council, for certain underground rivers had already been flowing for a while, but the Council was the moment when the desire to please the world, and therefore to put man in God’s place, clearly emerged.
He goes on to point out the ineluctable effect of this vast update that was, in fact, an update to correspond to the taste of the times.
But the true tragedy of the Council lay elsewhere. The Church began her update and renewal after the world. It is always the same thing. When the Church tries to be like the world, she lags behind. Because the world on the path of sin, that is, in its attempt to put man in God’s place, moves quickly and is always inventing new things, and the Church, however hard she tries, cannot keep up.
Thus, the Council set off after the world at the very moment when the world was already realizing, albeit confusedly, that man’s desire for independence from God could lead only to enormous disasters in every respect, be it social and political or cultural and moral.
Within the Church, few people realized that this “operation friendliness” was marked by obvious theological contradictions but also by a strategic mistake. The dominant version of the story said the opposite, and against a story imposed with great intensity (by some with good intentions and true enthusiasm, by others dishonestly and with ulterior motives), very little can be done, as we see today.
This “strategic mistake” that consisted in adapting the Church to the spirit of the modern world and by this very fact forcing her to lag behind was mentioned by the historian Patrick Buisson in his recent book La fin d’un monde (The End of a World, Algin Michel, 2021):
This Christianity partially reduced to humanism, to a holy parousia of “Man” in whose name they were summoned to kneel before the world, this sudden infatuation for the human sciences, came at the very time when a theoretical anti-humanism was developing with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althuser, and when Michel Foucault was announcing the “death of man” as a “figure of knowledge” in Les Mots et les Choses (Words and Things, 1966). The supposed common basis shared by believers and unbelievers was unexpectedly crumbling under the feet of the conciliar fathers whose brand-new aggiornamento was seen by shrewder observers as already behind the times.
The conciliar clergy did not stop at adopting the clothing fashions, dressing as civilians to fit in with the masses; they also espoused the intellectual fashions: Freudo-Marxism, structuralism… fashions whose proper characteristic it is to go out of fashion.
An accusing testimony
But back to Aldo Maria Valli, who points out the practical incoherency of the Council at the conclusion of his testimony: “It is curious to see how the Council, that wished to be non-dogmatic, itself became a dogma.” In his presentation of a collective work entitled L’altro Vaticano II (The Other Vatican II, Chorabooks, 2021), he proposed on his blog on January 30 a way to undo this incoherency, suggesting that Vatican II be “de-dogmatized.” This
Council that wished to be non-dogmatic, itself became a dogma. If we were to consider it as an event with multiple facets, with the hopes it gave us, but also with its intrinsic limits and the errors of perspective that marked it, we would be serving the Church and the quality of our Faith well. Often, looking at the origins of an illness causes a feeling of sadness, and an insidious impression of failure can arise. But that is what we have to do if we wish to find the path to a cure.
And he paid homage to the founder of the Society of St. Pius X:
Half a century after the end of the Council, it is finally necessary to deepen the substance of the questions raised by Archbishop Lefebvre, but also by many other observers and representatives of the Church, including the recent stances taken by Archbishop Viganò and Bishop Schneider.
The testimony of a simple layman shares the critical judgments of these two prelates, 45 years after Abp. Lefebvre’s I Accuse the Council (1976). He fully shares these judgments that explain what he has seen and undergone.
Regarding the “hermeneutics of reform in continuity” promoted by Benedict XVI in 2005 in an attempt to clear the Council, Aldo Maria Valli writes:
The hermeneutics of continuity do not hold up to the facts. For example, as far as the social kingship of Christ and the objective falseness of non-Christian religions go, Vatican II marks a rupture with the teaching of the previous popes and leads to the objectively unacceptable declaration of Abu Dhabi signed by Francis. Accusing critics of being attached to a past that needs to be left behind implicitly affirms the need to “go beyond” the teaching of all the popes up until Pius XII. But “such a theological position,” observes Bishop Schneider, “is ultimately Protestant and heretical, since the Catholic Faith implies an uninterrupted tradition, an uninterrupted continuity, without any perceptible doctrinal and liturgical rupture.”
By rejecting Benedict XVI’s attempt to save the Council, Aldo Maria Valli returns to Archbishop Lefebvre’s debate with Paul VI almost half a century ago.
Today, in the year 2021, it is time to abandon the unfortunate method of “making circles square,” in other words, trying to justify the unjustifiable. The expression “hermeneutics of continuity” cannot be used as a magic formula to hide reality, and the reality is that the Council brought with it the seeds of the catastrophe we have before our eyes today.
Which is what Archbishop Viganò declared in a study published on One Peter Five on September 21, 2020: “The Abu Dhabi Declaration would not have been conceivable without the premise of Lumen Gentium.”4
A. M. Valli’s testimony helps us to understand why we are so uncomfortable with this Church lagging behind, running after the world, trying to keep up, to please and above all not to displease: she is no longer a beacon, but rather a red light pathetically hoping to become a beacon again by multiplying her repentances, thus denying those who came before.
That is the true cause of our suffering at seeing the men of the Church try to seduce the enemies of the Church, forgetting that she has a treasure with which to convert them. The alarming statistics that we discussed at the beginning of this conference are simply a sign, a sort of thermometer. They are important, and rather than breaking the thermometer, we need to look for the cause of the fever: the infection. It is ideological.
In the face of this general crisis, the conciliar Catholics excuse themselves, saying that contemporary society is complex, when they should really be accusing themselves and admitting that they have a complex. Their new pastoral approach is based on an inferiority complex. An unavowed and unavowable complex, for it reveals a loss of the Faith: they espouse the ideas of the world, forgetting that the Church is the spouse of Christ.
Uncovering bitter fruits
But a question remains: what particular event made Aldo Maria Valli understand the responsibility of the Council? What fruit made him judge the tree? When questioned on Radio Spada on Feb. 27, 2021, he explained how he had discovered Tradition and the effects of Vatican Council II on the life of the Church:
All in all, I believe that the fundamental incoherency towards Tradition was already present in the opening speech by John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia. When claiming that the Council’s task was to defend and spread a sure doctrine, the pope said, “Nowadays however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity.”5 There is the rub. From a Christian point of view, it is not logical to oppose mercy and severity. In fact, severity in the defense and spread of true doctrine is the highest form of mercy, for its purpose is the salvation of souls. Through this crack, made at the very beginning of the Council, relativism crept into the Church, and abuse and treason found their way in. In a word, the world entered in and man was put in the place of God. The work of subversion had already begun long before, it is true, but the Council acted as a detonator, also due to an unjustifiably optimistic attitude towards modernity.
But the precise event that opened his eyes was this:
The triggering factor was the publication of Amoris Laetitia in 2016. My doubts were already there at the beginning of this century and had progressively increased since 2013, with the election of Francis, but the apostolic exhortation “on love in the family” opened my eyes for good and for all. I was forced to see that at that point, ambiguity and relativism had not only entered into the Church but had taken on the form of her Magisterium. I have to say that at first, as far as Amoris Laetitia goes, I was so incredulous that I denied the obvious. I read it several times, and, in the end, I had to face the painful reality. The document is imbued with the idea that God has a duty to forgive and man has a right to be forgiven, otherwise it would be necessary to convert. The eternal divine law is bent to accommodate the supposed autonomy of man. The concept of discernment is instrumentalized to exonerate sin. I would say that Amoris Laetitia validated the revolution that had taken place: not a change of paradigm (a vague expression used to justify the subversion), but the triumph of the modernist vision both in its contents and in its method.
He was therefore forced to judge the current pope, without falling into sedevacantism that he explicitly rejects.
The perspective adopted by Pope Bergoglio seems to be that of the world, which often does not completely reject the idea of God but rejects the aspects that are less in keeping with the dominant permissiveness. The world does not want a true father—loving insofar as he also judges—but a buddy, or better yet, a traveling companion who allows anything and says, “Who am I to judge?” And Francis offers the world this god who is not a father but a traveling companion. That is why I maintain that Francis does not act like a pope, because he does not confirm his brothers in the Faith. The proof of this is that he is applauded by those far from the Faith and the Church, who feel confirmed in being far, whereas his ambiguities and deviations disconcert those closer.
* * *
At the end of this first part, we can concede that the Council is not the only cause of the crises in vocations and the dizzying drop in religious practice, or of the doctrinal, moral and liturgical rupture with the bi-millennial Tradition, but it is inadmissible for this Council to be the one and only event in the history of the Church that we have no right to question, as if it were an untouchable dogma, a sanctuaried truth.
Endnotes:
1 https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/bishop-schneider-how-church-could-correct-erroneous-view-that-god-wills-diversity-of-religions
2 https://www.marcotosatti.com/2020/06/10/vigano-writes-on-the-vatican-ii-we-are-at-the-redde-rationem/
3 https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html
4 https://onepeterfive.com/archbishop-vigano-is-vatican-ii-untouchable/
5 https://scalar.usc.edu/works/god-man-and-the-universe-week-two/gaudet-mater-ecclesia