No, We Cannot Wish Vatican II Away

Vatican II will not disappear on its own. Only open and active resistance will preserve tradition in the long run.

As much as we would like, we cannot ignore Vatican II. It is the source and summit of everything wrong with what the world perceives as the Catholic Church today. It is the biggest obstacle to the salvation of souls in the world because it crippled the Catholic Church from fulfilling its mission in the world. It’s a barricade that must be removed not ignored.

In a recent episode of the Pre-Conciliar Radio podcast, host TLM Ryan interviewed Anthony Abbate from Avoiding Babylon. If you have not watched either one of those growing and popular channels, I encourage you to do so.

Interestingly, during the interview, the topic came up of how to deal with Vatican II. I am paraphrasing here, but as I understood him, TLM Ryan essentially argued that we just need to write off the Council, chalk it up as the badly flawed pastoral council that it was, and move on with converting the world to the true Church and growing the traditionalist movement.

Both he and Anthony seemed to make the point that Vatican II is a topic for the older dying generations, while the younger generations simply are not interested in Vatican II or theological debates about it. To move forward, traditionalists need to spend their time, talent, and treasure growing the Church on a more practical level and not battling this failed Council from the past.

I disagree with this assumption that we can simply move past Vatican II and refocus on more practical ways of growing the Church, rather than attacking Vatican II. It is not that am opposed to finding practical ways to convert the world, I am opposed to pretending like Vatican II does not exist. Because on a practical level the world will not be converted until Vatican II, and all its errors, are dealt with properly.

TLM Ryan’s desire to move past Vatican II is more understandable when you realize he converted to the faith about five years ago. More importantly, he began attending the Traditional Latin Mass upon conversion and never experienced the novus ordo Catholic world. Avoiding the novus ordo milieu was great for him, but it will distort one’s vision when it comes to understanding the problems with Vatican II.

I am also aware that TLM Ryan has done extensive work on running the demographic statistics and it appears the novus ordo world is dying. If the current demographics and lack of growth continue, what we know as novus ordo Catholicism will be extinct in less than a century. Traditionalists, on the other hand, are reproducing, growing, and will outnumber novus ordo Catholics in a few decades.

The problem is that the entire the world right now, in the present day, understands the Catholic Church as the church represented by Leo, Francis, Benedict, John Paul II, Paul VI, and the façade put forth by the Vatican and various bishop conferences around the globe. What the world thinks is Catholicism is actually something quite different.

By contrast, 90% of the world today, including self-professed Catholics, primarily know traditional Catholicism through Hollywood films depicting the Church in the Middle Ages—that is, a relic of the past. Others assume the horror stories of “Catholic guilt” and rigidity that existed before the Council are true and necessitated Vatican II reforms. Inevitably, if you make any headway in bringing friends and family into Traditional Catholicism, you will have to deal with the crisis in the Church at some point. There is no way around it. And one cannot simply address the crisis in the Church without dealing with Vatican II.

This is a frustrating and difficult reality to accept, especially if you never experienced first-hand how infiltrated your average novus ordo Catholic parish is with the modernist heresy.

A typical New Mass attending Catholic, unaware of the traditionalist movement, sees no problem because they do not realize what they are experiencing is, in fact, Vatican II modernism in their own parish life. Until you experience authentic Apostolic Catholicism, free of the Vatican II influence, what you don’t know, you don’t know.

While a New Mass Catholic certainly hears about Vatican II on a regular basis, it is true they do not think much about it. Why would they? The Vatican II documents are, in fact, convoluted, boring, and replete with platitudes to such a degree that few Catholics really take them seriously. And this is the case before one even takes a deep dive into its errors and heresies.

The danger is not that Catholics will read the documents. The danger is that Vatican II’s poison will infiltrate the Church to the point where its teachings become the new normal; ubiquitous to the point that Vatican II, the revolution, is no longer the revolution but the established norm. We are almost there.

I know I was there for many years. I know many of my friends and family are still there. It is an inevitable consequence of the past 50 years, where conversative Catholics, those who should have been leading the counter-revolution, rejected what Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was preaching, and spent their entire careers trying to reconcile Vatican II with true Catholicism. It is an impossible task.

The only reason we have not achieved a 100% complete modernist assimilation is because of those who, like Lefebvre, refused to accept the Vatican II revolution. We must keep the issue alive and seek its official abrogation to avoid the inevitable revolutionary outcome.

History as a Guide

Do not take my word for it. History teaches us what happens when revolutions are not resisted. What happened with the American Revolution?

The American Revolution was not just a break of English colonies from England, but it marked the official break of the English colonies from Christendom, a process that began before 1776 and can be traced back to Henry VIII’s split with the Church. Similar to Vatican II, while its origins preceded the event, the Declaration of Independence and new constitution formally signified a rejection of Christendom.

How have American Catholics reacted to this Americanist revolution against Christ’s Kingship? For the most part, they simply went along with it. That is the danger of the Americanist heresy that Pope Leo XIII condemned in 1899. They practiced the faith privately but permitted openly the replacement of Christ’s social kingship with a fake man-centered counterfeit.

Immigrants to America, including my own southern Italian family, eventually accepted the Americanist evolution with all its Protestant and Freemasonic roots without ever formally leaving the Church. It took only a couple generations for Italian immigrant families as a whole to essentially lose the faith while still claiming to be Catholic. This is what happens when the revolution is ignored and tacitly accepted. Falsehood becomes the new ecology, the air we breathe, at the expense of Truth.

Pope Leo XIII understood this problem when he condemned Americanism and when he insisted St. Frances Cabrini come to America and not China. He knew the Italian immigrants were at risk of losing the faith by not knowing the faith. Mother Cabrini saved lives and souls because of her refusal to accept Americanism, despite becoming an American herself.

At the same time, we needed our American bishops to not water-down the faith to accommodate Americanist individualism, freedom of religion, and separation of Church and state. But many of the American bishops, even in the nineteenth century, placed false ecumenism above doctrinal integrity. That was the heart of Americanism, which existed well before Vatican II, and it managed to find its way directly into the Vatican II documents, particularly in Dignitatis Humanae.

With all this said, we cannot simply not sit quietly and wait for the cruel but merciful hand of attrition to do its work. When the modernist bishops die, when the cathedrals held in their name are sold off to the Muslims, when the last conciliar pope (or antipope) who completely rejects any notion of the Catholic faith surrenders the Vatican to the United Nations 80 years from now, the world that we seek to convert will wonder what they need to convert to.

Sure, you and your Catholic family may remember the rosary and pass it on to your 20 to 30 grandchildren. The TLM may even be preserved and grow by relative leaps and bounds. This indeed is important to keep the faith alive. But the world will not view these enclaves of tradition as the Catholic Church, the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ. The rest of the world will see Catholicism as a relic of past spiritual divisions, another “denomination” that simply was absorbed over time into the globalist New World Order monolith.

But won’t the traditionalists remain to represent true Catholicism? In reality yes, the remnant is real. But to the world, no. Not if the world now comes to view true Catholicism as the Vatican II conciliar Church.

Tradition to the world will be there, but it will not be the true Church. The universal church for them will be found in the one world religion, headquartered at the United Nations, where all religions worship together and represent true unity, where the divisive specter of rigid dogma and doctrine is condemned to the trash heap of history.

Conclusion

This is why we must continue to openly reject and fight against Vatican II. We must insist on its complete abrogation. When the world as we know it, along with the New Mass, crumbles under the weight of the liberal rejection of the Church and Christ the King, millions will seek the Truth for some relief. We must give them a real option. We cannot pretend the last 50 years did not happen. Those seeking the truth may not be interested in theological debates, but they will be interested in the knowing where Truth lies.

They must come to know that Vatican II, and the post-Conciliar Church that sprang from it, is not the Catholic Church. Many will read Vatican II documents, in addition to the other post-conciliar modernist documents, and assume that is the Catholic Church unless they see an active counter-revolution seeking its abrogation.

Are we the Church of Leo and synodality or the Church of Pius X and tradition? These options are not reconcilable by anyone willing to engage these worldviews with reason and honesty.

The younger generations are smart and will accept that there was a crisis in the Church resulting from Vatican II. In my experience, even non-Catholics, evangelicals especially, can perfectly handle the reality that there is a crisis in the Church because Vatican II ruptured from over 1900 years of history. They often appreciate Catholic heritage, the legacy of Christendom, and will work through their theological issues if they recognize that the post-Conciliar Church is not the Catholic one.

What younger generations and non-Catholics will not accept is contradiction and hypocrisy. We must teach not only doctrinal truth but show honesty and consistency with the reality we face. We must not pretend Vatican II is perfectly fine or simply can be ignored. The future of Christendom depends on it.