Posted on 01/17/2026 7:02:55 PM PST by ebb tide
Once upon a time, Hollywood used to produce movies. Real movies, that is. They were like serious novels but on celluloid. They were movies that explored the depths of the human condition, with its soaring peaks and dreadful valleys. It was a time when formidable creativity was placed at the service of truth and beauty. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hollywood was the closest thing modernity had to Quattrocento Florence.
No longer. Today’s Hollywood is more a landfill for Woke ideology and degenerate carnality. This billion-dollar industry is insulated from the aspirations of the human soul, and its workaday employees (to call them actors would be an insult to that noble calling) occupy a caste system that renders them as fake as the Olympian gods of old. Excuse me, that would be an insult to the Olympian gods.
Sunset Boulevard is one of those Hollywood gems. This Billy Wilder 1950 classic is a deeply disturbing exploration of hubris slipping into madness. Sophocles would have approved. The movie circles around Norma Desmond, a passé Hollywood legend who persists in thinking that today is yesterday. Her tragic delusion plays all over her face: caked with dense layers of makeup resembling a graveyard of broken dreams and wasted aspirations. In frame after frame, the mesmerized audience sees the erstwhile matinee idol descend into lunacy, hermetically sealed away from the world of reality.
Vatican II is like that—not exactly Vatican II but its Self-Appointed Interpreters. These cognoscenti had no intention of giving the Church the letter of the Second Vatican Council; rather, they would promulgate the spirit of that Council. With that bona fides they concocted a Bright New Thing—bearing no resemblance to the Church of the apostles. They wedded themselves to a ’60s vision of reality, untethered to any past, cast about upon wings of an antinomianism without restraint.
This runaway iconoclasm was resisted by very few in the hierarchies of the seven continents, and when Rome attempted some kind of brake to this auto-destruction, it was only a whisper and met by stiff defiance.
Many laid this swirling chaos at the doorstep of the Second Vatican Council, only to be swiftly met with scoldings of infidelity. After decades of unrelieved catastrophe to the universal Church, many prominent Catholic figures began to suggest that much of the blame should be set at the feet of that greatly vaunted Council.
Not denying its validity but its interpretation, at their most discreet, they argued that there was a looseness in the wording of certain documents, a naivete hovering over much of the written texts, a marked departure from a more muscular form of doctrinal expression, and a general lack of dogmatic heft that marked all previous Councils.
Emerging slowly was a clear picture that many periti of the Council had been weighted down with the baggage of a parlous theological thinking censured by past pontiffs. Those very periti who were heading the anti-traditional charge succeeded in creating a cleavage between two factions: the Rahner/Küng party of the avant-garde theological journal Concilium, and the Ratzinger/DeLubac (both former enthusiasts of the leftist ideology that settled in around the Council’s periti) journal Communio. The latter championed the Church’s immutable teachings, the former, its permanent elasticity.
Clearly, by 1968 the question became: Whose Council Was It?
The Johann Pauline and Benedictine pontificates were an exercise in reestablishing the Church’s ancient self-understanding as normative.
Pope John Paul II, with his brilliant doctrinal deputy Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, wasted no time in promulgating groundbreaking documents and encyclicals—all nothing less than a declaration of war against the Modernist interpretation of Vatican II. That view had dominated the theological landscape of most dioceses, seminaries, and institutions of Catholic higher learning, resulting in unprecedented wreckage.
Pope Benedict XVI aggressively continued the doctrinal/moral program of his predecessor. This genius pope, however, gave the project a somewhat different inflection. He understood his task in a re-sacralization of the liturgy, which lay in shambles throughout the world. As he put it, “The Church stands or falls with the liturgy.” He breathed new life into the ancient theological axiom lex orandi, lex credendi, with its zenith being reached in Summorum Pontificum. There he redressed the crushing error of Pope Paul VI in the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass and released it from its former proscriptions.
Pope Benedict understood well the ruin that the Church had suffered with a distorted understanding of Vatican II. He desired to normalize its theretofore Super Council status by ingeniously minting a new theological program, the hermeneutic of continuity. It was sheer theological gold. It did not trespass upon Vatican II’s validity, yet it miniaturized its importance in the light of the past 20 Councils.
Even after these two pivotal pontificates, the Vatican II delirium persisted on the part of an increasingly irrelevant episcopal gerontocracy. By this time, few Catholics had even heard of Vatican II. What they did hear each time they faced a jarring novelty in the Church that seemed to defy her tradition was the imperious diktat: “That’s Vatican II!”
By the time of Pope John Paul II, there arose a new fervor in the Church, spurred on by his suppression of error and a robust presentation of the Faith. The rush of vocations and conversions were further multiplied under the pontificate of Pope Benedict.
None of this phenomenon was due to affection for a long-concluded Second Vatican Council. Rather, it was due to a loving wonderment at the patrimony of the Ancient Faith. Securing this excitement was their exposure to the majesty of the Church’s ancient liturgy.
Left in the dust were those still giddy about Vatican II, who appeared like a straggling line of octogenarian cheerleaders—irrelevant and embarrassing. Or, shall we say, the Norma Desmonds of the Catholic world, clinging to a failed dream rather than embracing a thriving present.
This Sunset Boulevard tragedy was recently on display in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. A respected Catholic intellectual attempted to argue that any new growth in the Catholic Church today should be laid at the feet of Vatican II. With supercilious bluster, he wrote that “because of Vatican II Catholicism’s living trajectory into the future can be seen in the U.S. in vibrant parishes, reformed seminaries, rising numbers of young converts to robust faith, burgeoning university chaplaincies, and media ministries."
Is there no limit to how blinkered Catholic intellectuals can be?
Vibrant parishes? The very few that are flourishing attribute their vibrancy to a sacred liturgy that transports them to Heaven, often the Traditional Mass. The second magnet is the teaching of the Catechism. Both have little to do with Vatican II.
Reformed seminaries? The few left are windswept houses whose vacant halls are blown about by the tumbleweeds of spent dreams. Contrast those with seminaries operating on the classical model before 1965: with learning centered on St. Thomas Aquinas, an horarium of disciplined prayer and sacrifice, within a cloistered life of ordered discipline, clad in the traditional cassock that characterized clerical life for millennia.
Rising number of new converts? Yes, there are. But only where they are being fed on the pages of the Catechism while intoxicated by the splendors of a rightly-celebrated Holy Mass. Certainly not in Vatican II-inspired OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults) land, where “converts” are introduced to nonspecific and groundless bonhomie parading as religion.
Media Ministries? Does our author mean Crisis, Taylor Marshall, Cluny Media, Sophia Institute Press, LifeSiteNews, Catholic Unscripted, Station of the Cross radio, Pints with Aquinas? If he does, then there is a galloping and restored Catholicism. I suspect not.
Then, from the same Wall Street Journal article, comes this: “From the late 18th century until the mid 20th, Catholicism in Europe, where more than half the world’s Catholics lived in 1962, was absorbed with defending the institutional church against the assaults of political modernity.”
And a worthy “absorption” it was. This was a modernity that threatened to swallow Catholicism whole. The Church had no choice but to defend her children against such malign forces.
She did so by raising up such epic figures like Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary. After eight years in prison, Mindszenty was freed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and granted political asylum by the United States embassy in Budapest. He lived there for the next 15 years. He was finally allowed to leave the country in 1971, and he died in exile in 1975 in Vienna, Austria.
There was Blessed Cardinal Wyszyński of Poland, who heroically led the Polish Catholic people in their time of Communist bondage, winning him five years in prison, from 1953-1959. This colossus of the Church was the principal inspiration to Pope John Paul II.
We must not forget Blessed Cardinal Stepinac of Zagreb, Croatia. In May of 1943, he openly criticized the Nazis, and as a result, the Germans and Italians demanded that he be removed from office. Pope Pius XII refused and warned Stepinac that his life was in danger. In July of 1943, the BBC and the Voice of America began to broadcast Stepinac’s sermons to occupied Europe, and the BBC commented on Stepinac’s criticism of the regime.
At the end of the war, Stepinac was found guilty of Nazi collaboration at a mock trial and was convicted and sentenced to sixteen years’ hard labor on October 11, 1946. At his trial, when his life was on the line, Stepinac asked his Communist prosecutors: “every nation has the right to independence, then why should it be denied to the Croatians?” He spent five years in the prison of Lepoglava, and in 1951, Tito’s government released him and confined him to the village of Krašić. Due to pain caused by the many illnesses he contracted while imprisoned, Cardinal Stepinac died in Krašić on February 10, 1960. On February 13, he was buried behind the main altar in the cathedral in Zagreb. Pope Pius XII stated that “this Croatian Cardinal is the most important priest of the Catholic Church.”
To this display of “robust Catholicism,” our Wall Street Journal author harrumphed, “Pope John believed it was time to leave the defensive crouch and boldly proclaim Jesus as “the light of the nations.”
Defensive crouch?
What were these cardinalitial giants doing, along with thousands of other valorous priests and bishops? Playing canasta?
There is a sparkling Catholic future to embrace.
The time of Sunset Boulevard is finished.
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