As a reader of history, and a "fan" of John Henry Newman and of the historian Christopher Dawson , I have always taken a long view of the Church. However, it has taken me a long to sort out what has happened to the Church since VII, to separate the sheep from the goats. I now understand the Reformation better, since what has happened since 1965 is another reformation, which like the first was characterized by a rebellion of the lower clergy. I don't know if you have read Jacques Maritain's Peasant of the Garonne, Which was published just at the end of the Council and which forecast all the bad things that have happened since. Maritain had been an idol of the liberals, but this they wrote off as the confusion of a garrolous old man, when what they hated was that he was spot on. It is a prophesy. I bought it, skimmed through it, and more or less discounted what he said. The most striking phase is "geneflection to the world." This is what so many priests did. They abandoned their mission; the ones who stayed too often were like Hans Kueng or , worst, Father Drinan. Eventually I got to see what Dostroyevski so mistrusted the Jesuits. They want a worldly kingdom of heaven, like the Muslims.
"The most striking phase is "geneflection to the world.""
I have often argued this very point with a much loved cousin who is a Jesuit (and, I fear, something of a heretic). The Church is in the world, not of the world. Its role is to conform the world to the Holy Spirit, to a path towards theosis, not make itself relevant to whatever the Zeitgeist, surely a demon, says the world is today. From my vantage point, it appears that this drive to conform The Church to the world is precisely the result of Vatican II.