[sinkspur]

whatever the weaknesses before Vatican II, these were miniscule when compared to what the Council has actually achieved. If before the Council there were problems, after the Councils there were only disasters

There were more than "problems" and "weaknesses" before the Council. There was an ossification of the Faith, a childish Catholicism that crumbled under the kleig lights of modern philosophy.

The crumbling simply happened sooner, rather than later.

The problem now is that catechesis is still focused on children, rather than adults. The Catholic Church teaches children, and plays with adults.

Jesus taught adults, and played with children.

[ultima ratio]

You know very little of modern philosophy if you think the Church's perspective crumbled because of its "kleig lights". Modern philosophy is primarily epistemological and inevitably leads to a subjective cul-de-sac from which there is no way out. Philosophy itself becomes ultimately impossible. This is why modernists affirm the relativity of truth--because for them truth is whatever you personally experience it to be. Otherwise it's unknowable.

For the Church to have embraced such a self-defeating process could only have led to disaster. And it has. Because what's new is not necessarily better. It is typical of the arrogance of modernist thinking to think otherwise. Yet in fact, not everything new is better, sometimes it's far worse than the status quo--as every true conservative realizes. We will soon learn the truth of this if liberals get their way on the issue of gay marriage.

The fact is, wisdom and high intelligence are not the same. The ancients like the Church Fathers had less information, less science, but had far more actual wisdom than we. The difference between being intellectual and being wise--judging soundly according to a well-founded discernment of reality--has always been critical--and until very recently the Church had always appreciated the difference.

[Conservative til I die]

I'm not sure what you're saying here. The Church shouldn't teach children the faith?

[ultima ratio]

"There was an ossification of the Faith, a childish Catholicism that crumbled under the kleig lights of modern philosophy."

Don't you ever tire of speaking nonsense? It was not the Faith itself that was ossified. The article speaks of an ossified philosophic system that was incapable of communicating with the modern world. But the faith itself was strong. These practicioners of what you dare to call a "childish Catholicism" built great churches all over the western world; they developed school systems and universities; they ran hospitals; their young priests and nuns--tens of thousands in the prime of life--went off as missionaries to remote corners of the planet to feed the hungry and to tend the sick and to spread the Gospel, not seeing friends and family for decades at a time. They put modern Catholics to shame. All this was fueled by an army of lay people saying their rosaries and attending Mass with far more frequency than anything known today. It is today's Catholics who seem childish in comparison.