The Real Spirit of Vatican II

In 1972, Zhou Enlai, premier of Communist China, was asked his opinion of the French Revolution’s consequences. His famous, and supposedly sagacious, reply: “It’s too early to tell.”

Only he wasn’t, apparently, referring to the upheavals of 1789 to 1799 but to the French student uprisings and anarchist/Communist/socialist strikes of 1968. He wasn’t taking the long view; he was saying, “no comment.”

But if the question had been, “Premier, what is your opinion of the Second Vatican Council’s results?” He would, indeed, have been wise to say, “It’s too early to tell.”

We all know about the immediate calamitous aftereffects of the Second Vatican Council. I’ve written about them myself in Triumph, my history of the Catholic Church. Here’s a paragraph summary:

Vatican II was drenched in worldly praise, which is always a bad sign, and its inarguably disastrous results came pouring in soon after. The number of seminarians collapsed. Thousands of priests and religious abandoned their vows to more fully participate in the world—in a manner of speaking. Laypeople followed, becoming more like their Protestant and agnostic brothers and sisters, divorcing, contracepting, and eventually aborting at similar rates. “Openness to the world” brought with it a sense of indiscipline. Vatican II documents were broadly interpreted to justify experimentation, beliefs, and practices that were unjustifiable. This should have been no surprise—and to conservatives in the papal curia, it wasn’t. It was ever thus with liberal reforms—they do not easily end or define themselves. In one horrible flush, the postwar Catholic recovery was lost as Catholics looked to reconcile themselves with a decade memorably described by the social scientist Robert Nisbet: “I think it would be difficult to find a single decade in the history of Western culture when so much barbarism—so much calculated onslaught against culture and convention in any form, and so much sheer degradation of both culture and the individual—passed into print, into music, into art and onto the American stage as the decade of the Nineteen Sixties.”  

But that, of course, was not the end of the story. The onslaught against our Christian culture has continued, even intensified; the Church continues to shed members like a mangy dog sheds fur. And yet, there are the converts, young people excited to pick up the banner of the Christian cause.  

As T.S. Eliot reminds us,

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

Except, given certain trends, the Catholic Church may indeed be triumphing. Sound shocking, given all the bad news out there?

Well, consider: the last sixty years have seen a liberal onslaught against the Church, both from within and without. There has been a numbing litany of heinous scandals and abuses, as well as jaw-dropping corruption and incompetence. But battered as she may be, the Church has survived. That’s no small thing to start with and build on. Compare the state of the Catholic Church in America to the state of the mainstream Protestant churches. At the time of the Second Vatican Council, about half of Americans belonged to a mainstream Protestant denomination. Now fewer than 10 percent do (and for young people it’s closer to two percent). Catholicism has declined, but it has done so at a relatively marginal rate.

So, Catholicism seems to have weathered the cultural storm better than many Christian denominations. But, really, it has done more than that. It has, like a knight, refurbished its armor and polished its weapons to better advance the cause. This can be seen not only in the media—with the work of men like Fr. Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron, bringing the faith to millions—but in the seminaries.

According to the extraordinary research of Dr. Ryan Burge, Catholic seminaries are producing the most orthodox seminarians in living memory. Of priests ordained between 1965 and 1969—graduating in the immediate post-Vatican II world—68 percent described themselves as theologically progressive, and only 16 percent described themselves as theologically conservative. In every subsequent four-year period, however, those numbers shift—and always in the same direction. Of priests ordained since 2020, two percent describe themselves as theologically progressive and 84 percent describe themselves as theologically conservative. (You can find the chart here.)

In other words, priests who grew up before the Second Vatican Council and then graduated from seminary shortly after are overwhelmingly liberal. But priests who grew up after the Second Vatican Council have become ever more conservative to the point where virtually no priest coming out of the seminary today is theologically liberal.  

That is surely not what a “Spirit of Vatican II” liberal or a “Smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God” traditionalist would have predicted. But those are the facts, and Pope Benedict XVI’s insistence on a “hermeneutic of continuity”—on reading the Second Vatican Council documents in continuity with Catholic tradition—seems to have won the argument among seminarians (as well it should).

In truth, even from the beginning, amid the tsunami of post-Vatican II liberalism, there were vibrant signs of something else: faithfulness, continuity, and reassertion. While many people abandoned the Barque of Peter—or, more nefariously, tried to change its course—the Barque plowed onward, due north. How else to explain, for instance, Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical issued by Pope Paul VI (the man who gave us the new Mass)?

Humanae Vitae is perhaps the most anti-modernist broadside issued by the Church since Pope Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors, and it was the least expected by all the clerical and secular modernists and liberals who promoted the alleged “spirit of Vatican II” during the swinging ’60s and the soaring ’70s. They met this restatement of Catholic teaching with shock and dismay, dissent and repudiation. But it was as utterly traditional as it was unpopular, and it has been reaffirmed by every pope since, especially Pope John Paul II (who put it at the center of his own “theology of the body”) and including Pope Francis, who called it “prophetic.”

If Pope Paul VI was a bit overwhelmed by the fallout from the Second Vatican Council and Humanae Vitae, Pope John Paul II, as I point out in Triumph, was “the first pope to turn the Second Vatican Council to good use.” His successes were highlights of the 20th century, including his crucial role in defeating Soviet communism, tearing down the Iron Curtain, and liberating the Catholic faithful in Eastern Europe from Communist repression. In addition, there was his eloquent and powerful condemnation of “the culture of death,” which remains an inspiration to the pro-life cause, as well as his and Pope Benedict XVI’s vigorous spiritual guidance that provided the momentum for a Catholic resurgence, seen most especially in the ever more orthodox seminarians, a trend that not only continued but even accelerated under Pope Francis.     

So, yes, the Barque of St. Peter continues to ride on stormy waters, as it always has. But with God’s grace, the outcome and destination remain the same. Our motto should be that of the Marine Corps: Semper Fidelis.