TRANSCRIPT
Over the past several weeks on the podcast I’ve been talking quite a bit about the Second Vatican Council. As you might expect, that has brought a lot of commentary out of the woodwork. Some of it thoughtful. A lot of it… not.
I’ve seen many commenters repeating things about Vatican II that simply aren’t true about the Council itself. Just as often, failures in the Church that appeared in the decades after the Council are casually attributed to Vatican II as if the Council itself caused them.
The most common example is the claim that Vatican II is largely responsible for the decline we’ve seen in Mass attendance, Catholic schools, and seminaries.
To be fair, I understand why some people make that connection. The Council closed in 1965, and the decades that followed did see sharp declines in many of those areas. In some places the implementation of the Council was chaotic, and certain people clearly used the language of Vatican II as justification for experimentation that the Council itself never called for. It is reasonable to say that some things done in the name of Vatican II contributed to confusion in the life of the Church.
But that’s not the whole story—and it certainly isn’t the deepest one.
If we want to talk honestly about much of the sickness we see in the Catholic Church today, we need to look somewhere else. It isn’t secularism. It isn’t Protestantism. And it isn’t a so-called “Protestantized Mass.”
It’s Catholics.
More specifically, it’s poor Catholic attitudes—Catholics who brought secular mentalities and expectations into the Church and into the Catholic experience.
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In many places, Catholics took the work of the Second Vatican Council and treated it as license to make the Church reflect the moral indifferentism of the modern world. Instead of allowing the Council to renew the Church according to her own tradition, some people treated it as permission to remake the Church in the image of modern culture.
That attitude is why we lost a sense of sin. It’s why we lost a sense of the sacred. It’s why, in some places, the Sacred Liturgy stopped looking like the worship of God and started looking like a performance stage.
It’s the reason iconography, statuary, and stained glass windows in many churches suddenly began looking like comic-book art instead of sacred imagery meant to lift the mind toward heaven. Sanctuaries were stripped bare, and churches began to resemble lecture halls or community centers rather than houses set apart for the worship of God.
I wish I could say those days are behind us. But I’d be lying if I said that.
The Church is still suffering from a crisis of poor Catholic attitudes disfiguring Catholic culture. We still have Catholics bringing secular mindsets into the Church—Catholics who view the faith, or the Church itself, through a political prism.
Worse still, many of us subordinate our Catholic identity to our political identity. We become more Republican or Democrat than we are Catholic or Christian.
Some Catholics even attempt to reshape the Church the way people try to reform a political party—pressuring, manipulating, leveraging donations, spreading rhetoric, slander, and misinformation. We repeat things about the Church or the Magisterium that simply aren’t true. And when the Church refuses to bend to our expectations, we defy—and defy again.
If I told you liberals are doing that, conservatives reading this would nod their heads. If I told you conservatives do it all the time, the liberals among you would start nodding.
Because the truth is that both sides do it.
If we call ourselves Catholic, that identity has to show itself not just in our words, but in our lives and in our attitudes. Humility matters. Docility matters. The Church is not something we reshape according to our preferences. The Church is something we submit ourselves to so that Christ can reshape us.
It was bad Catholic attitudes that deformed the culture of Catholicism from within—Catholics who brought secular attitudes into the Church and used the language of the Council as cover for it.
And now we’re seeing an equally errant Catholic attitude doing damage in the other direction. Instead of importing the secular liberalism of the 1970s into the Church, some Catholics today are importing culture-war tribalism, partisan politics, and ideological nationalism into the Church.
Different direction. Same mistake.
Once again, the faith risks being bent to fit an ideology instead of the ideology being judged by the faith. And when that happens, the Church stops forming Catholics—and Catholics start trying to reform the Church according to their own preferences, their own politics, and their own expectations.
When will we see the damage that we’re doing to the Church we claim to so love, my friends?
That time could be right now.
But the choice is yours.
