User:Vaquero100/experiment

Thanks again for your note on my talk page, JASpencer. I agree with everything that you said. Clearly the after-effects of the Council are a major concern for the Church, as it is a major concern for me, personally. However, as much as Traditionalists consider themselves as the embodiment of these concerns and even the embodiment of the solution, this is precisely what makes them very fringe in the Church and out of line with the Magisterium. The problems of the Church in the modern world are far to complex and vast to be solved by the 1962 or any other missal. Historians of the Church in the twentieth century agree that a crisis was brewing in Post WWII intellectual, political and cultural circles as early as the late 1940's and even the 1930's. The crisis was coming whether the Council was held or not. The Council did its best to stem the coming crisis before it was too late.

Evidence for the coming crisis includes the fact that new vocations to religious life among women were already beginning to decline as early as 1960. This decline began precisely as the demographics of the baby boom generation would suggest an explosion of new vocations cannot be explained by the "effects of Vatican II." In fact, the unprecedented social changes brought about by the War years including women pursuing higher education and joining the work force in mass numbers were destined to bring about much of what eventually did happen in the 1960's. College level co-education was a movement set into motion in the late 40's on campuses private and public all across the nation. The Ivies got all the attention in the late 60's and early 70's because they were among the last hold outs, but the movement was well in motion BEFORE the Council. The sexual revolution was coming. The feminist crisis was coming too. Even in "I Love Lucy" in the placid 1950's nearly every episode dealt with the frustration of housewives whose functional (though not moral and spiritual) indespensibility was being replaced by modern conveniences from washing machines to TV dinners. The constant chipping away at gender roles began in film in the 1930's and 1940's with an impressive array of films by the likes of Katherine Hepburn and other leading women who played competant lawyers and other dominant roles.

Other shifts were happening at the cultural and philosophical levels. The cumulative felt need to abandon the cruel past and begin afresh as well as the practical need to reconstruct Europe combined in an era of new construction materials and techniques and a shift in international design tastes, already expressed in the pre-War design concepts of Bahaus and le Corbusier. The resulting modern or "international style" made the Nineteenth century devotional images and architecture look tacky and irrelevant by the tastes of the time. In fact, the whole of the Church's artistic and architectual patrimony came to look stuffy and tired, a lot like renovating half your house and leaving the other half worn and 30 years out of date. In the 1950's Catholics and other Christians were living in a world that made their Sunday worship from the vestments to the hymnody to the Latin to the architecture look more and more like an curious and odd relic of history rather a living tradition.

In philosophy the incredible damage done by Derrida only began in 1967, but he was building upon and was simply the logical consequence of the Existentialists of the 40's and 50's, who were indebted to Heideggar in the 1930's, who "built upon Neitzche in the 1880's who ultimately was a consequence of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason published a year earlier in 1781. The foundations of Western Civilization and Catholic culture had been crumbling for centuries by the time of the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore, the Church's strategy of protecting Catholics from such intellectual onslaughts by the enforcement of the index was beginning to fail as affordable public universities in America and Europe were expanded to reach the majority of the middles classes.

Concurrently, as the emerging power of secularism was beginning to be unleashed (1960 JFK promises to NOT let his faith shape his presidential decisions) the Church saw in its historic enemies (Protestants, the Orthodox, and adherents of other religions) potential allies in facing the coming onslaught. This proved to be true when after standing alone in the fight against abortion since 1973, Evangelicals and the Republican Party in the US began to join the effort in the early 80's.

While the 1950's are commonly remembered as placid in today's popular culture, just beneath the surface were explosive currents which the Catholic intellectual community correctly understood as profoundly threatening. Finding a way to communicate with fidelity the ancient teachings in an idiom accessible to modernity was crucial if it was to weather the storm. The Council was not about making changes for the sake of change (although many developments "on the ground" following the Council were for the sake of mere novelty), rather the Council documents were primarily an apologia written to the modern world to explain the Church's ongoing role at the center of humanity. Many of the liturgical changes were made precisely to make the message of the Gospel even more accessible to the modern person than the ideas of the deconstructionists and the like.

Personally, I am a traditional Catholic. I do deeply desire a more profound recovery of the riches of the great ancient Tradition. But I am a traditional Catholic not because I think the SVC was a complete failure. Given the depths of the  60's cultural crisis, a 1950's style Catholicism might have collapsed completely. The reforms probably saved the Church through without comp I am a traditional Catholic because I believe the Holy Spirit is moving the Church at this time to cherish the Tradition and bring it to a new generation which is hungry for eternal truth expressed as alien to the modern world. The dissatisfaction with the modern world is now the Church's ally just as the attraction of the modern world 40 years ago was the Church's enemy.

I am not so naive to think that reverting (to us a wikiword) to the Catholicism of the 1950's is the answer because I dont think SVC was the problem. The problem was a cultural crisis on the scale of the French Revolution, the Reformation or the fall of Rome. I believe the Council was a prophetic movement of the Holy Spirit that probably saved the Catholic Church from a complete annihilation. A 1950's style Church would have been utterly unable to communicate with the 1960's generation at all. In fact, at least at the time, the parts of the Church which were least adaptable in that period have actually been worse than decimated. The entrenched and rigid French Canadian Church which had been the strongest element of the Church in North America was leveled to such a degree that scant evidence of a future even today. Conversely, the nation with the most practicing faithful in the world, the United States, was precisely the nation in which the reforms took their firmest roots.

As the Holy Spirit moved the Church in the middle of the last century to prepare for a coming urgent crisis, so I believe the Holy Spirit is moving the Church presently to weather the longer effects of secularism by returning to many or even most of its ancient expressions to offer as a refreshment to contemporary weariness with modern emptiness.

As a traditional Catholic I can praise God for his work in the Church in the age of the Council, and for his work in the present age and his work in all ages, because the expression of the faith is not the faith. He will always lead us to expressions of the faith necessary for the moment just as he always has.