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I'm not sure the council wasn't successful. If the goal was to define the place of the lay Christians (who are more like 99.99% of Christianity), after centuries of neglect, what would you look to happen? If the preists simply proclaim the new role of the laity, isn't that just continuing the old way? No, the laity must assume their roles by standing in the gap.

In the 1960's Catholicism was already dead in Europe, and we now know was in far graver shape in America than we knew. Remember Len Bias, playing basketball and looking healthy until he dropped dead? Like Len, the church's heart was ill.

The assertion that traditionalists make that the pedophilia scandals are a result of Vatican 2 are absurd on their face. Although it peaked in the 70s, By the mid-60s, child-rape was already common. And nearly all of the priests involved had completed their seminary training BEFORE Vatican 2.

The only way to save Len's life (and I will be embarrassed if I'm mixing up bball players' names) was surgery, a surgery no-one could know to perform. I think the Holy Spirit led Pope John XXIII to conduct surgery on the church. And the church is lying on a hospital bed, with IVs running into its arm, looking near death. How natural it is to say, "Wasn't it so much healthier making jump shots before those doctors did this to him?" The reality is we know just how gravely ill the church was. Pray for the cure.

(None of this, NONE of this is meant to fault the practices that trads cling to. Like Latin Mass? That is wonderful. By all means go! Just please recognize that the Holy Spirit has not left the Church orphaned.)

Not so. You are wrong on all three counts. First, the Council only destroyed the dignity of the priesthood without achieving a breakthrough with the laity. It did this by bringing the laity into the sanctuary, blurring the line between the priesthood of the ordained and the priesthood of the baptized--in the Protestant fashion. What the Council failed to do was quicken the apostolate of the laity in the secular context--which had been the Council's intent.

Second, Catholicism was not dead in Europe before the Council. On the contrary, in postwar Europe the Christian Democrats, allied to the Church, was the ascendant party on the continent and led the fight against Communism on the continent. Catholic countries had not yet imploded. It was only after the Council that Catholicism collapsed in Europe. Ireland, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, all predominantly Catholic, suffered irreversible losses. Vocations dried up. Church attendance plummeted. Seminaries closed. Ireland now is down to one seminary. Spain and the Netherlands are now completely secularized countries. Italy is struggling to sustain the faith in the face of Islam's continuing spread. The Council was a disaster for the faith everywhere, but especially in Catholic Europe. These changes are documentable--happening in the decade of 1965-1975--after the close of the Council.

Third, the recent lay commission on clerical sex abuse shows unambiguously that while there had been some abuse before the Council, it was in the period AFTER the Council that things got exponentially worse. Incidents of abuse increased alarmingly during the 1970s and 80s. There is also clear evidence of a homosexual networking that took over the seminaries after the Council and reached into the hierarchy. At least part of the failure of bishops to contain the spread of abuse has been their own vulnerability to blackmail by abusing priests. All this came about AFTER the Council.