Russell Shaw: Why the '60s Wend Wrong; Candid Cardinals (Catholic)

Zenit ^ | March 25, 2004 | Delia Gallagher

[ultima ratio]

Vatican II opened the floodgates. After the Council, new moral principles on sexuality and the gay orientation were openly espoused with impunity. Before this, most seminaries were incorrupt, though a few were turning "squishy" as Shaw states. Afterwards, the decline was precipitous. So too with lay Catholics. After the Council all hell broke loose, especially with the double-whammy of a scornful rejection of Humanae Vitae and the introduction of the Novus Ordo. Before the Council, deference to any encyclical had been the norm. But the laity had grown accustomed to the idea that anything could change, even the Mass and even fixed dogmas.

Then again, look at the recent study by the lay commission on the sex abuse crisis in the Church. There was certainly some abuse of minors in the 50s. But at nowhere near the rate found in the 60s and 70s. And while nobody is denying that there were problems before the Council, to seize on this to justify what happened after the Council is to lose perspective. It is the predictable argument of liberals who are always ready to seize on any excuse for the disasters that followed their radical interpretation of the Council. The truth is the Council made every one of the Church's problems far worse because it gave full license to the modernist agenda. Seminaries threw off their monastic preconciliar trappings--and became almost universally corrupt as a consequence.

[cebadams]

>> Vatican II opened the floodgates.

Vatican II was more a consequence of the times then the cause of them. Great liberal change was occurring:
- The Great Society programs of Johnson
- Roe v Wade
- Antiwar protests
- Civil Rights

The times were changing. There was common expectation that anything could change.

Vatican II was just another victim. In fact, it wasn't even the conclussions of Vatican II that we complain about but the liberalism that allowed and encouraged all sorts of experimentation (never advocated with Vatican II).

[RobbyS]

The so-callled Greatest Generation is responsible for much of this mess. They did not pass on the faith of their parents but spoiled their kids,choosing to be Americans first and Catholics later.

[RobbyS]

Sadly I conclude that V2 was simply a failed council rather than the new Pentecost some believe it to have been.

[ultima ratio]

This is more excuse-making. Here is what I said on the same subject yesterday when Tough Stough made the same claim:

"What possible change in the culture can possibly compare with the fall of the Roman Empire or with the French Revolution or with the rise of Hitler? Yet the Church held fast to its deposit of faith throughout these cataclysmic epochs. Why speak of 'changes' vaguely, as if they are inevitable forces, as if the Church had not faced down far worse in past periods of history? You think Rome was less pagan than Hollywood, or Robespierre less of a threat than Janet Jackson? No, it is not these vague cultural "changes" that have affected the Church, it is the revolution from within that occurred after Vatican II. You need to face this and not look for forces outside the Church to blame. The biggest of these influences were the conciliar pontiffs themselves--Paul VI and JPII. Both have set off on radical courses--and are responsible for the disastrous results. No others."

[RobbyS]

Seminaries threw off their monastic preconciliar trappings--and became almost universally corrupt as a consequence. I agree with you here, except for the exaggeration, which reminds me of Reformation talk about the monasteries in England. By and large the basic problem was the flight of so many seminarians, encouraged by their parents. Desperate to filll up empty schools, the bishops lowered their standards greatly. It was the equivalent to the hollowing of the U.S. Army after Viet Nam.

[ultima ratio]

You are absolutely wrong on this. There was no such flight in the late sixties, early seventies. You need to learn more about the truth of what really happened. Read Re-Formed Jesuits: A History of Changes in Jesuit Formation During the Decade 1965-1975 by Joseph M. Becker No other Order has been so closely examined as to what happened--and it's a horror tale with many lessons to be learned. The Jesuits thought they had all the answers to confronting modernity--their Order was a driving force behind the Council--and yet the end result was the destruction of four hundred years of a brilliant formation process in the span of less than a decade.

[RobbyS]

no such flight in the late sixties, early seventies I talked to a rector of a seminary who became a military chaplain, and he told me that he lost 200 students in a single semester,and that this was nothing unusual. Many of these guys were told when they came in that the celibacy rule was about to be relaxed. After Humanane Genesiae it became clear that the revolution had been deferred.

[ultima ratio]

You said, "encouraged by their parents." That was what I was reacting to. In point of fact, the cultural changes let loose by VII were so shocking and so absolute that it is a wonder anything was left in the Church after the tsunami hit. Nuns threw off their veils, dyed their hair blonde and started reading sexy novels. Priests ran off with nuns in droves. Jesuit scholastics set up a seminary in midtown Manhattan, complete with a saloon-like room with a permanently open bar. Nobody bothered with regular prayers, let alone the wearing of cassocks. In other words, discipline collapsed. Is it any wonder the gays felt they also had the license to do whatever they wanted?

[Jim Noble]

You left out of your summary, though, one very important fact, the when.

And also the who.

It is no accident, I am sure, that so many of the most egregious offenders were from the St. John's Seminary in Boston, nor that the first treatment center for homosexual priests who acted out with adolescent boys was set up in New Mexico by the Boston Archdiocese-in 1948.

Who was Richard Cardinal Cushing, anyway?

[RobbyS]

Until the 1960s, the laity were scandalized whenever their priest and nun children abandoned their calling. That all collapsed and mothers now embraced their ex-priest sons just as now they embrace their gay sons.

[RobbyS]

Cushing was among other things Joe Kennedy's pet priest.

[cebadams]

>> In point of fact, the cultural changes let loose by VII were so shocking and so absolute that it is a wonder anything was left in the Church after the tsunami hit.

VII was an accident in history. If it had never taken place we would still be in the same position we are today. The plague upon on us is moral relativism (modernism). We see before us today a world where the concept of sin does not exist. There are clearly no boundaries between right and wrong.

You seem to be looking for a target - an event in history that changed everything. There is no such event. Moral relativism is a contagious disease; an epidemic.

[ultima ratio]

"If it had never taken place we would still be in the same position we are today."

This is not true. It is demonstrable historically that the changes in the Church would never have happened except for the Council. Nobody knowledgeable disputes this. How do you think the modernism you blame entered the Church in the first place if not by means of the Council? It provided the opportunity for change that liberals had been lying in wait for for centuries.

[cebadams]

It is demonstrable historically that the changes in the Church would never have happened except for the Council.

No, sorry, I don't believe it is demonstrable historically. Not the council itself. Modernism was recognized as a problem long before. Here's a quote from Hilaire Belloc back in 1938 (The Great Heresies):

The Faith is now in the presence not of a particular heresy as in the past - the Arian, the Manichean, the Albigensian, the Mohammedan -- nor is it in the presence of a sort of generalized heresy as it was when it had to meet the Protestant revolution from three to four hundred years ago. The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called "The Modern Attack", is a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith -- upon the very existence of the Faith. And the enemy now advancing against us is increasingly conscious of the fact that there can be no question of neutrality. The forces now opposed to the Faith design to destroy. The battle is henceforward engaged upon a definite line of cleavage, involving the survival or destruction of the Catholic Church. And all -- not a portion -- of its philosophy.

It is necessary to separate VII with the "Spirit of VII". The enemies of the Faith were looking for any opportunity to push an agenda. VII just happened to be there and regardless of the results of the council the enemies of the Faith would have pursued their same agenda.

[GirlShortstop]

VII was an accident in history. If it had never taken place we would still be in the same position we are today. The plague upon on us is moral relativism (modernism). We see before us today a world where the concept of sin does not exist. There are clearly no boundaries between right and wrong.

You seem to be looking for a target - an event in history that changed everything. There is no such event. Moral relativism is a contagious disease; an epidemic.

Well said cebadams.  I hope my re-run below (I posted it elsewhere this morning) is pardoned.... but I consider it supportive of your points:

I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long.   But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it.  This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation.  It is obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our own time . . . At least five times, . . . with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.  In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.
(The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 250-252, 254)

FReegards!

[cebadams]

As long as we're exchanging favorite quotes, here's one of mine from Malachi Martin's Keys of This Blood:

... But Judas was no "breakaway". He did not intend to shatter the unity of the group, or to ruin Jesus and the Twelve. Judas was something classical: the antihero who insisted on implementing his own plan for Jesus and the others (in which, of course, he would play a major and self-fulfilling part). He could, he thought, reconcile Jesus and his enemies. He could, by decent compromise, ensure Jesus' success in the world by compacting with the world's leaders.

[ultima ratio]

Your citing Hillaire Belloc as if this proved something is somewhat absurd, given that the modernist heresy was defined and recognized by popes long before Belloc ever came on the scene. Why else do you suppose the preconciliar popes insisted on all ordinands taking an oath against Modernism? So yes, of course the heresy existed before the Council! But this proves nothing at all. Before any revolution there are ALWAYS revolutionary elements covertly operating, waiting to overturn the established order. This was also true with modernism. But it was Vatican II that gave modernists the chance to seize the power they sought. You need to read a little more on the subject. Unless you get better acquainted with the subject and the principals involved, there's no way to reasonably discuss what actually happened.