[Catholic Caucus] How the Church CHANGED overnight: controversy of Vatican II

LifeSite News ^ | January 27, 2026 | LifeSite News

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[Catholic Caucus] How the Church CHANGED overnight: controversy of Vatican II

Fr. Charles Murr opens up about the spiritual and institutional unraveling that followed the Second Vatican Council, recalling how ambiguity, failed leadership, and compromises with modern ideologies destabilized the Church from within. He argues the true crisis came not from the Council’s texts but from their misinterpretation and misuse by poorly formed clergy. The aftermath of Humanae Vitae, he says, marked a collapse in episcopal authority, as public dissent went unpunished and relativism infiltrated moral theology. Liturgical experimentation and the loss of sacred discipline further unmoored Catholics from tradition. Fr. Murr traces these roots of today’s crisis to a fateful moment when the Church exchanged clarity for confusion and obedience for opinion.

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TOPICS: Catholic; Theology
KEYWORDS: conciliarchurch; heretics; modernists; vcii

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Ping

[Rockingham]

For the sake of proper understanding, the elements of a process must be distinguished from its causes. To a great degree, like other institutions of that era, the Catholic Church before Vatican II was experiencing a crisis of confidence due to loss of influence with the rising generation.

Vatican II was an effort to reverse that trend, but it failed due to a lack of clarity and strategic vision. Blaming poorly formed clergy misses the deeper problem. The clergy may have been poorly formed, but it was put to an exceptional test by the growing influence of television, secular education, and modern science among the youth of the era. The result was a destructive and continuing contest between traditional Catholicism and modernism.

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Vatican II was an effort to reverse that trend,...

I strongly disagree. VCII resulted in a doomed attempt to conform with the "rising generation".

[Rockingham]

An appeal to the rising generation of boomers is what Vatican II became, and of course always was in the secret plans of the modernists in the Catholic Church. Yet the expectation generally held by Pope John and most of the prelates at Vatican II was renewal and updating, not a revolution.