(Summary: A New Catechesis Series dedicated to The Second Vatican Council will add a fresh reading and of its Documents says Pope Leo XIV. All while ignoring the landmines contained in the same documents)
“When the wicked carried us away in captivity, required from us a song.
Now how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
(Lyrics from the song by Boney M – Rivers of Babylon, based on Psalm 137: 1 to 4)
There has been so much afoot in Vaticandom to take note of. The consistory called by Pope Leo XIV, which is currently underway as I pen this blog is the big one, the proposal by Father Louis-Marie de Blignières’ for the TLM (reported/interviewed by Diane Montagna, followed up by an excellent analysis by Radical Fidelity), Bishop Barron’s mildly recalcitrant views of the Synodal agenda, the SSPX’s recent ‘threat’ of sorts of the course of action likely to be pursued by them, etc. have set social media abuzz.
But the one I decided to blog about was that Council that all other Councils must bow before (to borrow a phrase from old Teilhard de Chardin): Vatican II. Why? Because Leo’s X (Twitter) handle posted this rather morbid, dark-humour, of a post.
Yes, dear ladies and gents (and all fairy tale creatures if you are a liberal left-wing clown-fish), after sixty years of enduring the pestilence of Vatican II, we are now going to be subjected to (ding, ding, ding, Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight” drum roll)…more of Vatican II.
I kid you not.
The Vatican thinks that solving the problems caused by Vatican II, needs exactly that – More of Vatican II. To those following this space, it isn’t a new phenomenon. There have been voices since the last decade or so since Bergoglio supplanted Ratzinger as ‘Pope’. The notion being floated by the modernists and progressives is that Vatican II was not fully, adequately, and correctly implemented.
To those familiar with Communism or Socialism, they will know that this is a utopian fallacy; a fools errand, hoping that a “better implementation” of Communism or Socialism will solve the problem; This is seen in most Socialist countries and is espoused & implied by most Democratic Socialists such as Bernie Sanders who believe that the Soviet Union or Venezuela don’t count as examples of failed socialism. These ‘leaders’ think or believe that Socialism in a democratic setup is different from an authoritarian one (similar to Russia or erstwhile China under Mao). And clearly this is the idea that has imbued the Vatican since Bergoglio.
As with Socialism, Vaticandom believes that we must all ‘Vatican-II harder’ in order to get the results of a democratic process. It is for this reason that after Vatican II we have got strong, regular doses (that would put down an elephant) of ‘inclusivity’, ‘listening’, ‘dialogue’, ‘synodal’, etc. These words tom-tommed the pillars of Vatican II (Collegiality, Religious Liberty, & Ecumenism), forming a Democratic-Socialist congealed layer over the fundamental doctrines and teachings of the pre-conciliar Church, eclipsing it to a great degree. Since the onset of Vatican II, these vacuous ‘fluffy’ words have been drilled into the Catholic psyche by the hierarchy. Where have these ideas come from, if not for an idea of Man-centred, Anthropocentric, Freemasonic, Democratic-Socialism?
The idea that the office of the Pope should be reduced to the Bishop of Rome and the first among equals (Collegiality), is at the heart of this phenomenon of Democratic-Socialism. Why have a monarch ‘Pope’ when you can have a democratic ‘understanding’ or a vote by all the Bishops/Cardinals?
Concepts like ‘Dignity’, ‘Inclusivity’, ‘Listening’, ‘Dialogue’, ‘Synodality’ have all contributed to make us feel like we are all in it together, that we must walk or journey together, build bridges, meet the people where they are, go to the peripheries, etc. culminating in the notion of building a better world in the here and now – a Freemasonic-fraternal world where all are included, all are heard, and are talking to one another, and where we continue building bridges regardless of race, nationality, gender, or religion. In this new and improved ‘world’, we cannot speak about Jesus or Mary (let alone evangelize), lest we hurt the sentiments & ‘dignity’ of people with other faith – after all, all religions are a path to god, a ‘wise man’ once said. In other words, the Democratic-Socialist Church/World we have been thrust into is one which is distant and different from the true Church/World – a new religion! as was articulated by Abp Lefebvre in his 1974 Declaration.
It is impossible to modify profoundly the lex orandi without modifying the lex credendi. Corresponding with a new mass we have a new catechism, a new priesthood, new seminaries, a charismatic Pentecostal Church—all things opposed to orthodoxy and the perennial teaching of the Church.
This Reformation, stemming from Liberalism and Modernism, is poisoned through and through; it derives from heresy and ends in heresy, even if all its acts are not formally heretical. It is therefore impossible for any conscientious and faithful Catholic to espouse this Reformation or to submit to it in any way whatsoever.
There was no better place to understand the pulse of this new initiative other than on X itself.
Here are a few excerpts of people commenting on the afore-mentioned post (other than yours truly)
Philip Lishman wrote: “There appears to be an idolatrous fetish concerning the Second Vatican Council. As if everything before it – which gave life to vast numbers of vocations and an army of Holy and Great Saints – is to be forgotten as if it never were. Does evil will to forget good, and good, evil?”
An account called ‘Yvth’ said something very poignant: “doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results”. How true is this? Completely restackable.
Saggezza Eterna, by far the most popular comment, noted: “Vatican II stands as the suicide note of Western Christendom. You cling to the failed liberalism of the 1960s while the faith collapses in Europe. That Council stripped the altars and emptied the seminaries. You call it a North Star because you navigate solely by the approval of the secular media. You transformed the Bride of Christ into a spiritual NGO for the globalist regime. We demand the Church Militant. You give us the Church Subservient.” Boom!
Count Krzystofel stated the obvious emphatically: “The Second Vatican Council DESTROYED The Catholic Church.”
Leticia Velasquez said: “No thanks. If the Vatican ignores the Sacrosanctum Concilium where it states that the primary language of the Mass is Latin and Gregorian Chant should have pride of place in the liturgy, we can’t trust you to catechize us on VII.” (addendum to her comment was a post from ‘The Catholic Thing’)
Ad Voluntas posted this gem of a meme that really summed up the matter (and which I use as a thumbnail for this post)
To those on the Papal post who felt that Vatican II had done a great service to humanity, I shared a link to the article by Phil Lawler (Catholic Culture) who highlighted the NBER research (A “working paper, Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 countries) that directly linked a drop in Mass attendance to the Second Vatican Council, making it clear that the esteemed author/writer believed that Vatican II was a real problem.
Imagine my dismay when I turned to Substack and found that the same esteemed author/writer posted the below views that were in marked contradiction to the entirety of his 2025 article.
“The good news” Lawler states is that “The Pope wants to discuss the actual documents of Vatican II, “and to do so not through ‘hearsay’ or interpretations that have been given”. He follows this with “If Pope Leo can draw new attention to the Council documents, while reading them in the light of that tradition, he could eliminate much of the confusion that has spread in the wake of the Council.”
This is a common charitable misgiving that most Catholics who were subservient to the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI have. They honestly believe that we can overcome the current circus if only the Council documents, can be read in the light of tradition.
This reasoning implicitly holds that the documents of the Second Vatican Council are to be read based on an ‘interpretation’ – a hermeneutic of continuity. But what happens when another Pope like Bergoglio is thrust upon Catholicism? Someone who has a radical, progressive, and liberal ‘interpretation’ of those same documents? And this is a real possibility because Lawler himself speaks of the documents being read “in the light of that tradition”, which implies quite evidently that the documents can also be conversely read in the light of liberal progress.
The Vatican II documents are like a post dated cheque. It could make you rich. But it could also be a bad cheque. I wrote about how to identify the duplicity in these documents in a blog recently which one can read under a few minutes to understand the problem.
Even if the council documents are read with a traditional lens, there is no surety that this interpretative framework will be retained by Catholics in future, unless there is an extraordinary ex cathedra stamp by Leo to this framework or hermeneutic, something that is unlikely; remember that Leo’s post-conciliar predecessor, Pope Paul VI, stated that Vatican II avoided solemnly defining new dogmas in an extraordinary way, emphasizing its ‘pastoral’ nature. With this ‘fluid’ pastoral approach, dogmatic rulings, especially if they are at odds with pre-conciliar rulings, will be difficult to wiggle by and will expose the regime for what they really are: a bunch of new-age charlatans.
Another great resource to understanding the problem of Vatican II (mostly from a sede vacante position) is an article by Sean Wright (The WM Review) which was written in June, 2025 (go here for the article). While I am not a sedevacantist per se, the backdrop on Vatican II and resources are certainly meticulously detailed and useful to understand the broader picture on the subject of the Second Vatican Council.
Ave Maria
