60 years of The Council

History, problems, and hopes

Photo by Nicolas Weldingh on Unsplash

Sixty years ago, the Second Vatican Council was opened. Three years later, it closed. Another five years and a new (and evidently committee-made) liturgy was imposed on the whole Church. Between the end of the Council and the new form of the Mass came the Summer of Love and the student revolt of May 68, heralding what became known as the Sexual Revolution, made possible by the combo of the Pill and antibiotics. The latter events are considered in sociological circles as marking the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity; the former, well, that is what I’ll be discussing here.

First of all, it is necessary to establish what the heck is Modernity, and what changes (or doesn’t) when it becomes Post-Modernity. Modernity is how we refer to the consequences of a way of thinking that places supposedly universal human reason above everything else. In the political field, it becomes what one calls ideologies: recipes for Utopia that “only” demand the whole world (more often than not including human nature) to change in order to fit The Perfect Idea of how things should be. It never worked, and never could work; human nature does not change, as anyone who reads old stories, or even the tales of other peoples, can realize. Instead, what happens when ideologies are tried is that a vast mass of people get put aside, killed, or at least arrested or turned into second-class citizens. Auschwitz, the Gulag, and American jails are examples of that phenomenon.

In the economical and technical field, on the other hand, Modernity was an unmitigated success story: nowadays a tiny minority owns the better half of all riches, and we have almost everywhere a society built on consumption (that is, destruction: from polluting mines to polluting landfills in a few years, with the help of vast amounts of polluting energy-generation).

Post-Modernity, on the other hand, is only the logical consequence of Modernity. After all, denying the importance of real life while proposing a supposedly-universal Reason, through which every single person would arrive at precisely the same conclusion about everything, can only work well in a very small and uniform society. Its very pretension of universality, however, makes it want to advance further, like a vast blob of uniform thinking and world-building, and it will always find, pretty soon in fact, indigestible human material. Post-Modernity is what one gets when people realize that the theory of a universal reason is wrong. It is common to refer to Post-Modernity as “the end of great narratives”, by which one usually refers to both ideological narratives (i. e., ideologies) and Pre-Modern worldviews, such as (traditional) religions. I agree with the former and disagree with the latter. At least to me it seems obvious that ideological thought has been a form of ersatz religion, and while Post-Modernity indeed crushes ideological phoniness, the void created leads to time-tried religion eventually finding its place in aiding people to organize their worldviews.

Now what was the state of (at least Western) societies at the time of the Council and the arrival of Post-Modernity? It can be argued that the Golden Age of Modernity, in which its good elements retained enough of Pre-Modern social structures to be made to work without letting the basic awfulness of Modernity to destroy everything, was in the beginning of the XXth Century. There was enough technology to make a huge difference for the better in people’s lives, without having yet the cult of trashy tech novelty that Consumerist society would bring. Old plagues and diseases were vanquished or at least greatly minored, art was beautiful, and the future seemed bright. World War I (1914-1918), however, put an immediate end to that. It was a war for no reason, and such a stupid war. The worst elements of technical modernity were put to diabolical use, with poisonous gases and bombs dropped from airplanes starting the industrial-scale slaughter that became more the rule than the exception along the rest of the century. Military use of aviation, by the way, led Santos Dumont, the inventor of the airplane (unless one counts as an airplane a contraption that can’t take off without a catapult; in which case some Americans claimed years later they did it first), to kill himself.

His was in a way quite a symbolic death, for WWI indeed marked the end of Modern innocence. All the technological advances that had improved people’s lives had their dark sides exposed in the carnage of war. Human nature, after all, had not changed. The new technological means only made Man even more murderous, greedy, and arrogant. By the end of WWI, Europe was in a shambles. Old Empires, that a few years earlier had seemed to be the final form of human society, were destroyed or greatly weakened.

Each European country, having had the flower of its youth needlessly killed in the man-eating Europe-wide trench-war, found itself peopled by a vast majority of widows, children, and old folks. In such a social context, it was quite predictable that now only the right to vote was granted to the fair sex in most Europeans countries, but also that – having become the most important electorate – lady voters would rebuilt their States on more “maternal” ways, granting them unheard-of powers to “protect” their citizens. At the same time, a generation of boys grew up without fathers, and when they came of age they found substitute fathers in people just like their daddies have been: old war veterans, such as Mussolini, Hitler, Franco… It lead to yet another change in the shape of the new and plastic post-WWI states, that kept their “maternal” powers while adopting a “paternal” toughness, usually embodied in a National Leader. A tough, no-nonsense father substitute for a whole generation of orphans. Equally predictably, these strong man started fighting among themselves, and that is how the very same war reignited as WWII.

Clinging to their most specially-beloved belief that theory is superior to practice, Modern societies in the interwar years made an ideological idol out of what had been, until the First World War an odd mix of traditional Pre-Modern forms and some Modern accidentals: the Bourgeois Family. Before WWI the family was a fact of life, like having arms and legs. Afterwards, it become an ideal, especially because it had become to less common to have an intact family. Men, being quite scarce in the market, became much more valuable than women, even as so many widows worked and had as their only males in their lives their aged menfolk and their small boys. The idol, the ideal, the ideology, became that a family should consist of a man as its undisputed master and head, a mute woman selflessly dedicated to her husband and kids, a few small versions of them as kids, and that was it. In other words, in a time when the remnants of extended families were all people had, the nuclear family – Dad, Mom, and the Kids – became the model according to which all other situations would be measured.

And then the war started again, as World War II. Technology had advanced enough to become more of an equal-opportunity killer, with carpet-bombing genocide killing as many – if not more – elders, women, and children than young soldiers. The demographic result of that new round of gratuitous mass-murder, therefore, was the opposite: instead of a society of widows, the years immediately after WWII witnessed an absolute novelty: the greatest baby boom ever, so great we still call The Baby Boom. It was quite predictable, too; after all, after spending a few years killing and avoiding being killed, generating Life certainly becomes the greatest urge one can have. The babies born in that period are those we call now Boomers (as in “OK, Boomer”).

All the elements of a generation shock were coming into place. Instead of fatherless children aching for a father figure, there was a generation – and a huge generation! – who could only complain of having too much of a father. After all, they were the children of the kids raised in that insane nuclear-family-oriented interwar Bourgeois Family ideology, and their parents were raised to play the roles of Great Man and Subservient Woman. While there are few dependable studies about that, it is widely believed that female alcoholism became a serious societal problem in the generation of the Boomers’ parents. It is probably true, as Valium (marketed as “Mom’s little helper”, or so I is said) became the best-selling “medication” in the US pretty soon as it was released. During the Council, by the way.

There is yet another element in that unhealthy mix: women mature much earlier than men. While sixteen y. o. young ladies are the muses of much of pop music, no woman would look twice at a sixteen y. o. boy. In practical terms, it means that when that huge demographic wave of Boomers came into age, the ladies arrived first in the love market. A surplus, as any economist can tell us, means a cheaper price for any good. And that is what happened in that generation, precisely while the Council got in motion. In 1962, the first-arriving ladies of the Boomer generation were 17: prime age. Getting into college, and so on. Their male siblings, though, would only get ready to partake in that romantic free-for-all in a few years.

Being priced cheaper in what until then was the marital market meant that the wishes of women were worth less than those of men. As they are the ones who – even with the Pill – can get pregnant and need the guy’s support, women tend to demand monogamous relationships. Men, on the other hand, tend to spread their seed far and wide if they can. With lots of young lady Boomers competing for the attentions of a few older lads born during WWII, the desire of men promptly overwhelmed the precautions of women. More than just a chemical help, the Pill-and-antibiotics combo became an excuse for the few young man to force their ways onto the many young ladies, and the Sexual Revolution was born. It is not an accident that the French students’ revolt in May 68 started as a row because male students wanted to be allowed to enter into female college dorms.

Now that was the societal pressure-cooker situation when the bishops of the whole world were convened in a Council. Everything was ready for a large-scale societal and cultural explosion, but apparently nobody could see it. There were a few things in the air, though, but most of them were due to the situation in the previous decades than to the demographic (and soon cultural) reality in that precise moment in history. After all, bishops tend to be older men – in that case, basically people born in the end of the XIXth Century or beginning of the XXth, who lived the greatest part of their adult life in the interwar period, imbibing that time’s worldview and ideological bias. Their assistants, the periti (“experts”), were younger, but not that younger. Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI was one of them, and he was born in 1927.

Now an Ecumenical Council is serious business. The most serious kind of business this side of the Second Coming, as a matter of fact, for the teachings of an Ecumenical Council have the highest magisterial authority possible. No Church teaching is more highly dependable and necessary for one to be a Catholic than those of Ecumenical Councils. In almost two millennia, the Second Vatican Council was the 21st one to be held. They usually dealt with theological definitions, and most were convened to answer cataclysmic heresies, as when the Council of Trent (1545-1563) defined and explained everything the Protestant revolt had gotten wrong. Now this one was different; Pope John XXII (1881-1963) convened it to perform what he called aggiornamento, or updating, a pastoral (as opposed to doctrinal) roadmap to help the Church deal with the world. The Modern world, in fact, a world that was soon to explode in the prelates’ faces. That strange and short-lived world in which family was replaced by the ideological vision of the Bourgeois Nuclear Family, in which Great (ideological) Narratives shaped the lives of people and led most European nations to engage into two rounds of senseless killing, cherry-topped with the arrival (and detonation!) of nuclear bombs and the prospect of Mutual Assured Destruction if the Cold War suddenly became hot. Star-nucleus hot.

Just as an example, one of the possible ways to live the Catholic Faith in that world was provided (and apparently proved successful) by the writings and practice of Saint Josemaria Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. Leaving aside the absurdities of pop fiction (no killer albino monks there, unfortunately), we can say that the most important elements in the way his spiritual children live are the importance given to work as a means of sanctification and the utmost discretion. An Opus Dei member is, above all, discreet. They wear no clerical clothes (and are not clergy), and do not advertise their participation in Opus Dei. People can spend decades working beside a member without realizing he has made a vow of celibacy and lives in a religious community, in a life as ordered as that of a regular monk. Even the married members will stick to prayer schedules, have a spiritual director guiding their lives, censoring their readings, directing their penances, and so on. It is, also, in a great measure, a worldview that takes for granted that mid-century ideology of the nuclear family, with the husband being place so high above his wife that married ladies are advised to get up early to put make-up on before their husbands can see them. Now that’s the kind of thing the Conciliar Fathers (that’s how bishops together in a Council are called) had in mind when they convened, and it is certainly not a coincidence that after the Council it became one of the most favored organizations within the Church.

The shock between all that preparation and all that discussion about how to deal with the Modern world and the sudden explosion of the very reality on behalf of which the conciliar fathers were trying to “update” Church practices was tremendous, and it is still strongly felt throughout the Church. Now, every single one of the previous Councils had a quite long period of chaos on its wake. It takes time – more often than not several generations – for a Council’s teachings to be “digested” by the Church and become fully integrated in her practices and, most importantly, in the lives of the common faithful. This time, though, there was a novel element that make the Great Post-Conciliar Confusion (GrePo-ConCon, for short) exponentially stronger. While by the time of the previous one – that was cut short by a war in 1870; in thesis, the one we are talking about was supposed to be its continuation – the telegraph had already been invented, there had never been anything like the Second Vatican Council’s (oh, so modern!) press coverage in Church History. It had usually been the job of each Conciliar Father to go back to his diocese and implement as its bishop whatever the Council mandated, and the only conduit between the Council’s mandates and his diocesan clergy and faithful was him. Papal authority in Rome was far away, and most often than not the bishop would die of old age before any new instructions came from the Pope. This time, the press – as usual for it – was telling people all over the world whatever madness its reporters believed was happening in the Council sessions much before the Bishop could go back, and go back the bishops did. Several times, in fact, as this Council was held in yearly Spring sessions. Every time they (together with their assistants) got back home, they’d find all kinds of weird theories about the Council accepted as truth by both clergy and laypeople (after all, it was in the newspapers!). Whoever had the opportunity to read in the news anything about any subject one knows about is able to imagine how far from the truth the press’ renderings went. And with the press’, the clergy’s and the faithful’s. Add the explosion of Modernity, the Sexual Revolution, and so on, and the bomb recipe goes boom.

To make it worse, much of the ethos of the actual Conciliar decisions went in the way of St. Escrivá’s discretion. More exactly, the Conciliar Fathers tried to tone down what was then called triumphalism. In an irremediably ideological world, their thinking went, it paid to tone down the fire-and-brimstone, stop pretending secular authorities were afraid of being excommunicated, and instead go after the flock, especially the lost sheep, wherever they were. That is why there was, for instance, a short-lived fashion of “worker priests”, who would work in factories and dress like regular factory workers. In practical terms, the version of it presented by the press and believed by much of the clergy made it almost mandatory to, in fact, hide the Church, hide anything that was conspicuously Catholic. Usually without waiting for orders (that would never come, by the way; it wasn’t the Council, but the GrePo-ConCon in action!), many priests threw away their cassocks (still mandatory today by canon law…), stopped shaving the top of their heads, got girlfriends (they’d soon be allowed to marry, they thought), and so on. Many wrecked their churches, often destroying beautiful and priceless art in the process.

It was a process that went both ways, especially because Paul VI, the Pope who oversaw the greater part of the Council and most of the GrePo-ConCon, placed a great importance on letting things roll so that he would not be too much of a triumphalist. After courageously saying “NO” to contraception (something all forms of Christianity always forbade. The Anglicans were the first to accept it, in 1930) in 1968, in the prophetic Encyclical Humanae Vitae, he lost the little power he still had, and became a virtual figurehead. A strong-willed Pope could have been able to stop, or at least diminish, the most destructive aspects of the GrePo-ConCon’s. Not Paul VI, though. His theoretical subordinates often did what they pleased, even in things that clearly mattered to him, and he just accepted it. Curiously, his name in the (probably apocryphal) Prophecy of St. Malachy was Flos Florum, “the flower of all flowers”.

The worst came during the Council and immediately afterwards, but other very bad stuff kept happening all over the Church. The French historian of religion Guillaume Cuchet attributes (in French) most of the decline – “destruction” would probably be a better word – of Catholicism in France to the changes that happened immediately after the Council, pinpointing the year of 1965 as the one in which the French – that in some religions would have 97% of the population at Mass on any given Sunday – essentially gave up religion. He says it happened because the measures I referred to as “hiding the Church” made people come to the conclusion that if what was crucial yesterday was now not only no more required, but in many ways discouraged, nothing mattered. At first it was not everything was turned upside-down. The 1965 liturgy, for instance, had too few differences from the previous form to affect directly people’s Sunday experience, even though novelties kept sprouting like mushrooms in most parishes – someone playing a guitar instead of organ music, for instance, or the priest turning away from the altar and celebrating on the other side of a table in order to see people’s faces; these two fashions were never mandated, but became the virtual rule up to our day. Very popular devotions were in many parts virtually eliminated, and for most people they were the bread-and-butter of religious life. The effect of so many changes in what was supposed to be unchangeable and, even more than that, what could soon have become the only unchanged part of life, when the Boomer rebellion exploded, turned multitudes away from Church life, and therefore from the Church. The same happened with the clergy, by the way: a vast part of the priests – some say up to half of them, worldwide – asked to be released from their vows and live as laymen, and during Paul VI’s reign to ask was to have it granted.

And things got even worse, even uglier, with the reform of the liturgy. The new form of the old Mass was made by a committee, and it shows. Even more so, it shows a very Modern spirit of rationalization, trimming down repetitions that were considered “superfluous”, reducing the liturgical year to neatly-cut portions by the elimination of the transitions between liturgical seasons, and increasing the number of scriptural readings to such a point that it became virtually impossible to memorize Mass readings – 3 instead of 2 Sunday readings, repeating every third year instead of every year, with new weekday readings whereas Sunday readings used to be repeated throughout the week; another side effect is that while before it was enough for a priest to have a collection of homilies by a good religious orator to help him prepare his own, the new calendar prevented the use of such aids. Another very Modern trait of the new liturgy, present in both the Mass and the formerly-called Breviary, now called Liturgy of the Hours (the daily prayers of the clergy, consisting of mainly Psalms and shorter prayers arranged according to the liturgical year, saints of the day, and so on), is the amount of choice. While before Mass would vary only in a few parts from one Sunday to the other, and virtually nothing would change in the parts people heard and/or interacted with, today no two Masses will have much in common except for the very parts that used to change (readings and prayers of the day), unless the diocese has some kind of policy in place to ensure at least that all Sunday Masses will use the same basic texts, arranged in the same way. It is quite common in Brazil for dioceses to impose or at least advise parish priests to buy and use a certain brand of mass-produced leaflets. Some dioceses or regional unions of dioceses produce their own leaflets.

To make things even worse, in open opposition to the very texts of the Council it became the rule to have Mass celebrated in the vernacular. And the translations were usually very problematic. In many languages, for instance, Our Lord’s words “[my blood will be shed] for you and for many” became “for you and for all”, as if everybody would be saved. In English, the basic text was kept more of less intact, but the daily prayers suffered a very creative translation that changed exquisite and nuanced words and sentences into stuff that sounded like child talk (thankfully, they were re-translated a while ago). In Portuguese it was the opposite, and while the daily prayers were kept more or less intact the basic text was thoroughly gutted and interpolated with so many “answers” from the congregation that the non-stop back-and-forth makes the whole Mass sometimes sound like a Marx Brothers’ sketch. In French, the Creed’s translation was mangled in such a way that it seems to preach the very same Arian heresy it was originally written to quell, having the Son to be of the “same nature” instead of the “same substance” as the Father.

The Church dressed herself for a Modern fox-trotting ball and ended up in a Post-Modern rave, and that is what made the GrePo-ConCon so bad. So bad it keeps being a Great Confusion, although it has indeed been getting much better with the years. One of the reasons why it is getting better is that the Moderns, the true ones, are dying out. The theological term for all errors that issue from Modern thought is Modernism. St. Pius X (1835-1914) called it the synthesis of all heresies, because, indeed, as Chesterton once wrote, a heresy is what happens when someone grabs a small part of the Truth and makes it bigger than the whole (as Protestantism did with the Holy Scriptures, for instance), and Modernism essentially consists of grabbing an idea and running amok with over reality.

It is quite interesting to notice that the great Saint died as the First World War was starting. In other words, the Modernity he knew and whose theological consequences he grasped so well and fought so hard was at its apogee; technology was not yet the matter of Mutual Assured Destruction. Airplanes were cute things on whose wings young ladies performed acrobatic feats, not machines that murder from above. Great and (seemingly) wise Kings ruled, not substitute-father Strongmen (or, as in out times, clowns, technocrats, and barely-alive teleprompter readers). The seeds were al there, though, and he identified many of them. The one that interests us most in this text was in plain view of all in the political field, and starting to enter the theological realm in his time: the (thoroughly Modern) split between the Right and the Left. It originally started as a division between two factions in the French Revolutionary Assembly (its Parliament). Needless to say, there was nobody there, in either faction, whose thinking was not heretical in a way or the other, and that is how it remained. Catholicism cannot have in itself essential divisions such as Modernity always had, and the very idea of Right-wing and Left-wing Catholicism is Modernist.

But that is what we had then, in the aftermath of the Council. Parish priests were mostly people raised in the interwar period, who often lived with divided heads: on the one hand, they lived the Faith; on the other, they were intellectually leftists or rightists, that is, Moderns. When the basic daily elements of the way they (and their parishioners) lived the Faith suddenly disappeared in the GrePo-ConCon, all they were left with was Modernity, even if they could see, just by looking around them, that Modernity was exploding. Now there is a name for the faction of Modernity that wants to blow everything apart: the Left. For a Modern mind, the GrePo-ConCon looked like an ecclesial Leftist revolution, and many joined it by virtue of a desire to go with the Church. To follow the Spirit; if not the Holy Spirit, at least what became a catchphrase of the Grepo-ConCon, “the Spirit of Vatican II”. It meant all kinds of madness never mandated by the Council’s texts, but that became fashionable at the time.

A very common theme of Left-wing Modernism at the time, for instance, was to “let the youth lead”. Apparently forgetting Original Sin, many otherwise decent clergymen understood it to be a mandate of the Council to let sex-crazed (and often drugged-to-the-gills) youngsters lead everything in parish life. And in came the guitars, and holding hands, and dressing the priests as clowns (serious. It happened), and dancing in the Sanctuary, and all that hippy-dippy stuff Catholic Boomers still insist to do.

The other faction of Modernism, as you must have guessed by now, is that of Right-Wing Modernists. They accepted the same un-examined presuppositions that gladdened the hearts of Left-wing Modernists, but hated each and every one of these. So, there was a New Church (even if the Creed keeps stating she is One), and while the Left-wing Modernists were all for it, the Right-wing Modernists hated it and wanted the Old One back. So now Mass was in the vernacular: leftists loved it, and rightists hated it. So the Church should hide its visible signs (bells, cassocks, whatever): ditto. Guitar-strumming instead of organ and plainchant: the same. Premarital sex was “no longer a sin” for Left-wing Modernists, and Right-wing Modernists doubled down on the crazy Bourgeois Nuclear Family madness. And so on.

Right-wing Modernists – nowadays mostly called radtrads, for radical traditionalists – were a tiny majority, but unwittingly they helped the vast Left-wing Modernist majority a lot and made a GrePo-ConCon that could and should be a short flash in the pan grow a lot worse and remain up to our days. Much of it can be attributed to their antagonizing attitude towards Church hierarchy (they seem to believe, in true Modern fashion, that disrespect for authority is a virtue) and their lumping together of unfortunate fads and legitimate orders cherished by their leftist brethren-in-Modernism so as to reject the whole at once. A short personal anecdote to make the point: in the 1990s, I was a (late-vocation) seminarian in a conservative Brazilian diocese. I had never heard anything about Traditionalism, and I had no idea a Brazilian bishop had been excommunicated for helping Msgr. Lefebvre (the main personality of Right-wing Modernism; disciple of the French Right-wing political thinker Charles Maurras, whose books were included by Pius XI in the Index of forbidden books) in an outlaw episcopal consecration, but when my superior noticed I liked Latin a tad too much and could not understand why the priest would go behind a table instead of celebrating on the main altar, he told me he was afraid I could become a schismatic. At the time it made no sense for me; only later I found out that many aspects of Catholic tradition that were thrown out by Left-wing Modernism had become tainted by their association with Right-wing Modernism, even if they were still in the books as the regular way to do things – for instance, priests still need episcopal authorization to celebrate Mass in the vernacular, but not in Latin, and the present Missal tells every time they shall turn to the altar and turn to the people. Needless to say, it make things a lot harder to fix! Even Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote that this getting-the-priest-behind-a-table business is the worst fad to ever become usual in liturgy, could do no more (as a Pope, no less!) than suggest that priests place a crucifix and six candles on the altar to make it less of a closed-circuit back-and-forth between the priest and the laypeople and give God some room. More than that, he said, could become yet another major trauma in regular people’s religious lives. Something almost as bad as the original one, right after the Council, probably.

But now things are starting to get into place. Left-wing Modernism has lost its grip on much of the Church, even if Right-wing Modernism is as noisy (and disobedient) as ever. The main reason is Time, that great healer. The people who were forced to pick a side in the late 1960s and early 1970s are mostly gone, as well as most of their radical disciples. The timeless Truth, as well as many ancient treasures of the Church, have been rediscovered by people young enough to see no point in the Modern factions and fights. Again, an anecdote: where I live we have both the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM for short) and the ordinary form (in Portuguese, with Father behind a table, guitars…). The same people I meet at one form I meet at the other, and even when we had the TLM every Sunday (unfortunately, the priest had to move back home for health reasons) I would meet most of the Sunday TLM people in weekday masses at the regular parish church. The most active people in the parish are usually the ones who prefer the TLM when they have the choice, and if they haven’t they won’t think twice before going to Mass in the ordinary form. And they are obviously right: Mass is Mass, even if it is partially hidden by noisy guitars and other extemporaneous stuff.

The other reason, one that the perpetual whining and name-calling of Right-wing Modernists make it harder to realize, is that for the first time since the Council we not only have a Pope who has not been a part of it – St. John Paul II was a Council Father and Benedict XVI was one of the Council periti, but Pope Francis was not even ordained at the time of the Council – but also a Pope who does not come from Europe, the center of Modernity (the Anglo countries could be called Modernity’s biceps, perhaps, but the head of the beast has always been in Europe). Unlike any other Pope in the previous couple of centuries, he lived his life in a place where basically everybody was a Catholic, where Modernity was no more than a very thin veneer in the form of legals institutions that nobody took seriously, where no truly Modern factions and fights would develop until his middle age, and where the people, the government and the Church essentially shared the same (Catholic) worldview – Carlos Menem had to be baptized in order to become President of Argentine in 1989, as only a Catholic could serve in that function and he was a non-practicing Muslim. His experience of Modernity and Modern factions is essentially negative: in Argentinian politics, the (right-wing) military dictatorship and the (left-wing) terrorist movements made life pratty hard for regular people in the 1970s. In ecclesial matters, the takeover of his order (the Jesuits) by Left-wing Modernists got him demoted from provincial superior to night watchman in a far-away convent.

While he was the bishop of Buenos Aires, he had two noteworthy incidents that show how he does not care much for any kind of Modernism, preferring (in a true Catholic way) to deal with real people instead of ideologies. At the time, the most rabid Right-wing Modernist schismatic bishop alive, Mr. Willianson, was in charge of the (equally schismatic) Society of St. Pius X’s La Reja seminary. His priests and seminarians, as well as himself, obviously wanted to wear cassocks. In Argentina, though, only Catholic priests are allowed to wear a cassock, and schismatics who believe to be more Catholic than the Pope do not fit the definition of “Catholic”. The authorities were planning a crackdown on those guys impersonating Catholic priests, but the (real) bishop of Buenos Aires, our present pope, “adopted” the schismatics, declaring to the authorities that as the maximum local religious authority he had allowed them to be there, as if they were, say, Franciscans or Dominicans from another place who opened a house in Buenos Aires. In a way, it was a foretaste of the extraordinary jurisdiction Pope Francis later granted the priests of the same schismatic Society so that they now can give valid absolution for people who are not dying.

The other incident would seem to go against the first, if read in a Modern key, but, again, in fact it only shows him not to think in Modern terms. A group of people asked, after Pope John Paul II authorized, to have the celebration of the TLM in Buenos Aires. He promptly granted it, with the proviso (allowed in St. John Paul’s liberation of the TLM) that the readings would follow the new liturgical calendar, and named a priest to celebrate that Mass. There was a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth, as Right-wing Modernists tend to believe the new calendar to be an abomination (when it is simply a bad idea, a typical committee thing) and most people who followed ecclesiastical politics to the point of being aware of St. John Paul’s liberalization were Right-wing Modernists, even if not enough to go to the TLM celebrated by the schismatics. For him, it was just the sensible thing to do, much better than having the poor priest preparing two different homilies for the same day, but that was because he just did not think as a Modernist and wasn’t aware of what they were really looking for.

His first days as Pope also showed it clearly. First, he tried to get close to the Roman people, as he had just been made the Bishop of Rome; it took him a while to realize that the role of the Pope is nowadays in a great many ways a Modern role, and the Pope is virtually prevented from being the Bishop of his immediate Roman flock. In a curious and sad way, the role Right-wing Modernist schismatic give their bishops (who – an absolute novelty in two millennia of Church doctrine and History – are not given authority over circumscribed territories, working more as globe-trotting sacrament providers) ends up being akin to what Modernity made of the Popes. Soon after Francis was made Pope, he came to Brazil for World Youth Day, and in a speech for Spanish-speaking youth he asked them to “be troublesome”, to go to the streets and bring people the Gospel.

In a very real way, what was being heralded was the reversion – which he would preach in acts more than in words in the following years, fitting his chosen name – of the dumbest part of the GrePo-ConCon, that “hiding the Church” thing. Unlike the defeatist discourse of Benedict XVI, who would often talk of “being back to only twelve”, Francis wants to bring the battle to the very Gates of Hell (which will not prevail, as we know), to go out and fight for souls. That is why we tells us to bring everybody that lives near the Gates of Hell – people with disturbed sexuality, thieves, prostitutes… That is why he reverted yet another ugly Modern fad that led so many people away from the Church, forbidding the clergy to refuse Baptism to the children of people who is not active in the Church. Like a Medieval Pope, Francis sees the Faith as something one lives rather than as the content of books, even if they are very good books.

And that is the reason why he fights Modernity in all its forms: he knows the evils it has wrought in the Church and in the world. He always preaches on the Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell, and Paradise), he always tells us to be aware of the tricks of the Devil, he always condemns in very strong terms all ideological thinking, be it leftist or rightist. When Right-wing Modernists took advantage of Benedict XVI’s full liberation of the TLM to pervert priests and laypeople and started using the Mass(!) to turn priests against their own bishops (when since the time of the Apostolic fathers being in perfect communion with one’s bishop is the hallmark of orthodoxy – “where the bishop is, there is the Church”, wrote St. Ignatius of Antioch), what did our Medieval Pope do? The Medieval thing, of course: he devolved unto the bishops what has always been their role and let them – neither Rome nor individual priests: the bishops, successors to the Apostles – be in charge of the liturgy in their dioceses. Again a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth among Right-wing Modernists, but only a bullet-proof Modernist can deny that it is the bishop’s role to oversee the divine liturgy in his diocese. “Episkopos”, the Greek for “Bishop”, means “overseer”. Literally.

Step by step, in the absence of the hard-boiled Left-wing Modernists that fully dominated the Church for a very short time (hey, sixty years is nothing in the History of the Church), with the good Catholic youth that increasingly “bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old”, with a Pope that has no time to lose with any form of Modernism (or even Modernity), the Holy Ghost will be allowed to do His work and make sure the Church finally reads and understands the Second Vatican Council. Pretty soon, probably in less than a couple hundred years, it will have been fully implemented, and its riches will be available for all.

A Council, after all, is much more than what the Pope and the Conciliar Fathers wanted to do. It is not theirs to make, but God’s. And the divine element is not in the immediate reaction the next few generations have to it, but in the Conciliar texts themselves, and how seldom have they been actually read! Instead, the craziness of the GrePo-ConCon was allowed to substitute for the Council, to the point that when one talks about the Council nowadays most people think about the liturgical reform that came a few years afterwards. The Council told lay people to learn Gregorian chant, and certainly did not tell people to bring rock bands to Mass. But the real Council and even the actual contents of the Council texts were lost in the noise, and are still lost and hard-to-see in the remaining smoke of the explosion of Church life that happened as a consequence of the mixture of the spirit of the times (sadly mistaken for a non-existent “Spirit of the Council”) and a quite unfortunate demographically-caused cultural peculiarity.

It is quite sad, in fact, but in the end it has been a short GrePo-ConCon, compared to the previous 20. The First Vatican Council – which defined papal authority and infallibility – had not been fully digested almost a century later, by the time of the Second Vatican Council, as proved by Paul VI’s indecision about with his own authority. In the future, John Paul II will probably be considered the first Pope to have understood and put in practice what was defined in the First Vatican Council. When will this later Council be fully understood? It is impossible to know. I’d venture to say much of it will remain locked until not only the last periti, but also their disciples, have met their Maker. Again, a Council is not something the Pope and the Conciliar fathers make. After they have fulfilled their role, after they have been used by God to give the Church directions, they become an impediment, an obstacle for the right understanding. After all, they have in their memories all the ugly stuff, the fights, the disagreements, the factions trying to impose this or that wording to a sentence, unaware that they were in fact being used. Their reading of the text will never be clear-eyed, as they will always remember each word’s history. Their immediate disciples will probably remember more clearly the unfortunate associations and connotations their masters could not separate from the text than the text itself. But the third generation of students will have near enough distance to start understanding it, the fourth will probably have a clearer vision and understanding, and so on.

Each generation will be a step closer; meanwhile, Our Lord is providing the means for it: John Paul II finally got the First Vatican Council to work and gave Left-wing Modernism a hard time, opening to door for the recovery; Benedict XVI squashed the horrendous heresy that there are two different Churches, the Pre-Conciliar and the (Post-)Conciliar, by the obvious announcement that there shall always be a continuity in the understanding of all things Catholic; Francis, the Medieval Pope, is guiding us out of the Modern (and Modernist) mess, and reminding us that we have to bring the battle to the Gates of Hell.

After all, they will not prevail.