Very often people will ask, as I myself asked for years: “Why in the world would the Church’s leaders persecute some of the most faithful Catholics—those who form the TLM [Traditional Latin Mass] communities?”

They are penalized, to be sure, their venues taken away, promoters disciplined.

Why indeed?

The answer is not an agreeable one, but sometimes we must take bitter medicine in order to get well. Truth can be the bitterest of medicines. [Uh-oh. Look out.]

. . . of all the sicknesses in the Church, denial of reality is one of the most widespread and most unacknowledged. When this sickness is not diagnosed, the sufferer cannot take the steps he needs to take in regard to spiritual diet and exercise.

That last is a grabber. He’s means to prescribe or begin to uncover what’s needed for the pew-sitters of the world for them to stay (a) interested and (b) devout.

The Church’s leaders persecute the most faithful Catholics . . . a leadership . . . at this time dominated by a network of active homosexuals and theological modernists.

Oh.

They are not always the same people, but they rely on, and receive, one another’s support.

We all know individual good bishops or cardinals, but such exceptions [!] are a controlled opposition, with very limited mobility.

Exceptions?

The more [these bishops and cardinals] act or speak out, the more ostracized they are, and sometimes they can even be canceled, as priests are canceled lower down.

In the ranks, where non-conformers pay for their sins.

What then of “the enormity of the evil represented by each of these forces”?

Homosexuals reject the first principles of natural law.

Modernists reject the first principles of divine revelation.

Together, they reject the foundations not only of Christianity but of religion as such, and therefore of morality.

Hard words, hard to take. He warned us.

Their “religion,” if such it can be called, is one of self-actualization and self-regard—a secularized inversion of the Christian mission to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.

Condemnation, you have a target.

Theirs is the fashionable subjectivism and flexible relativism of the postmodern West, where “anything goes”—except, of course, traditional faith and morals, for this faith and these morals would eliminate them, possibly even in the old-fashioned method prescribed by pre-modern popes who did not think the death penalty “inadmissible.” [?!]

This false religion, combined with unlimited vanity and lust for power, explains why much of our senior leadership is hell-bent on erasing the TLM from the Church and uprooting the communities that grow around it.

Whom they see as their enemy.

Thus, when people exclaim—baffled by Traditionis Custodes and its ongoing implementation —“But look at how the TLM attracts young people! Look at the large families and numerous vocations!” they are . . . missing the point.

It’s precisely because of this fruitfulness, not in spite of it, that its enemies want to crush it. The more fruitful it is, the more furious they will be.

Whole thing is a mess. Modernists and same-sex-attracted join forces to shoot down opponents, run-of-mill purveyers of every-day Catholicism who know what side their butter’s on.

They see people every day dying for help and have bosses with eye out for non-conformity and ready to slap him down. Conformity, otherwise called unity, actually uniformity, is the never-ready explanation.

Drug-addiction horror story, Trump’s comments, Satan at work

Wall St. Journal pays tribute to couple slain by the son they worked hard to bring around in a lifetime of addiction.

President Trump got caught up in the story, blaming the couple’s politics, as if to say they got what was coming to them.

Secondary story this, his ill-timed, misguided comment, a case I say, of giving way to a Satanic urge, by one who has dealt stoically with an amazing list of harsh commentary and attacks on his physical well-being.

Great day for Satan, Cardinal Newman would have said.

. . . to give ourselves only to this or that commandment, is to incline our minds in a wrong direction, and at length to pull them down to the earth, which is the aim of our adversary, the Devil.

Something else. Drug slavery is at the heart of this parental slaughter, and freedom from drug slavery is at the heart of President Trump’s closing down the border invasion and more recently hijacking delivery boats, indeed having them blown out of the water.

More than any other president, or public official for that matter, he has taken steps to shoot down the trade that kills thousands and/or leads addicts to kill their loved ones.

The president’s blaming the dead or seen as such for how they felt about him, bizarre as it was, oddly enough might be seen as referring in part at least to his crusade against killer drugs.

Either way, we have in this episode not only the horror of the son’s insane reaction to loving parents but also a case in point of the deadliness of the enemy that threatens the nation, what the president has recognized and seeks to thwart.

Daily stats for The tackling of Vatican 2 #3, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . . #3 #3 #3 #3

The last of writer’s introduction to his coming book . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Part 5 of his coming book. . .

. . . traces the aftermath from Paul VI through the present pontificate, asking how the conciliar vocabulary ripened into the theology and pastoral practice of our own time.

It’s been at work, he says, in Council documents and encyclicals and explanations inspired by them, and official catechisms and codes that attempted to “domesticate” their language.

Getting us used to them, the better to have us take them for granted.

The book’s goal [will be] not to build a psychological portrait of “the spirit of the Council,” but to show, line by line, how certain sentences and choices of vocabulary made the present collapse possible and, in many cases, almost inevitable.

One long fait accompli.

He sees a grim picture, of “disoriented faithful — empty seminaries, closed parishes, profaned liturgies, catechisms that no longer catechize — the lived outcome of decisions made in aula and ratified in ink. In theology, words are deeds.”

Oh?

An adjective can shift the burden of a sentence. An adverb can hollow out a command. A cautious footnote can sabotage a dogmatic paragraph.

Catholics who kneel in half deserted churches, or who have had to seek refuge in marginal chapels and improvised altars, are living in the echo of those [phrases].

We don’t have to assume that “the true Church has perished or Christ has abandoned His promises.”

We do have to “face the possibility that . . . the official continuation of that Church has . . . become a counter witness to her own past, a counter church that survives by parasitism on the language and structures it inherited.”

Confusion.

And “recent claimants to the papal throne”? They either “lack authority” or “have abused it to the point of moral unusability.”

Yes, Virginia, there is such a word. Point being, morality be damned, full speed ahead to a new world out there, my friends, where the livin’ is easy . . .

“We must look honestly at what they have done with the Council they celebrate as their charter.”

Namely?

Calling a council in the first place “in an age that no longer believed in councils or in truth itself.”

The age itself being nothing to match up with., or accommodate. Lost cause, Newman would have said.

Look to the last years of Pius XII leading up to the John XXIII election, and “the strange confidence with which the Church opened her windows to a storm she could not control.”

“Only by returning to that moment,” says our man, “can we see the scale of what followed.”

Nothing beats hindsight, of course. It’s why people write books.

In his book our man raises the curtain “on the last years of a world that still believed the Church could not change because God did not change.

“Pius XII reigned over a hierarchy that seemed unshakable.” he says. But “the soil beneath it was already loosening.”

As a Jesuit trainee in the mid-’50s in a three-year stint as a philosophy student, there were distinctions between new and old thinkers.

Our man about these days:

Theologians who once whispered their theories in seminaries had begun to speak them aloud. Bishops who had sworn to defend tradition learned to speak of adaptation.

Surrender was in the air.

John XXIII called for a council which was greeted by most “as a curiosity.”

Nothing to get excited about, a “tidying” of things Catholic, “not a revolution,” begun quietly, ‘in offices and corridors.”

It’s what this book is about.

— That’s all for now. Next comes the book . . .

The tackling of Vatican 2 #2, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . . #2 #2 #2 #2 More of writer’s introduction. His argument outlined . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Vatican II marked a moment when the Church began to describe herself in categories drawn from the modern mind rather than from revelation and metaphysics.

The Council replaced the vertical grammar of grace and sin with a horizontal grammar of experience and dialogue. The supernatural order was not . . . denied [but] was absorbed into the language of psychology, history, and sociology, where it could be reinterpreted at leisure. The faith still wore the old vestments, but it spoke a new dialect, one that made obedience sound like conversation and salvation sound like personal fulfillment.

The transformation . . .

. . . did not occur in a single decree or . . . year [but] unfolded through a sequence of texts that looked harmless when skimmed and dangerous when read slowly. . . .

. . . creating “a new ecclesiology in which the Church of Christ ‘subsists’ in the Church while extending, somehow, beyond her visible boundaries.”

Specifically . . .

The declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, borrowed the vocabulary of natural rights to restate an old truth about conscience, then quietly detached it from the ancient obligation to seek, embrace, and hold the one true faith.

And . . .

The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes treated the modern world not as Babylon to be converted but as a dialogue partner to be affirmed and understood on its own terms.

Each text seemed only to adjust a hinge. Taken together, they turned the door.

Oh.

The book will examine those hinges one by one. . . . by placing conciliar texts alongside the magisterium that preceded them.

Making a series of comparisons:

The method is almost embarrassingly simple. One sets the Council’s own words beside the words of earlier popes and councils and asks whether they can be reconciled without violence to reason or to faith.

See how that plays out.

For instance . . .

When Leo XIII wrote that the Church “is one, in doctrine, in government, and in communion,” he spoke the language of identity.

When Lumen Gentium chose instead to present the Church in terms of “degrees of communion,” it adopted the language of approximation.

No comparison.

It’s not “a matter of style,” our man writes, but the difference “between a theology that thinks in clear borders” and one that’s like it. Close but no cigar.

Approximations, the better to match users’ zeal in the matter.

The usual defense tells us the Council should be understood “in continuity” with the past.

The writer pledges “as much sympathy as the facts allow.”

But continuity can’t mean that “a thing and its opposite are both true at the same time.

Either the Council expressed an accepted faith in “a new register” or it introduced a new one in the old phrases.

I think I captured the reader’s gist.

In any case, you have to read the documents as they stand, “not in consoling paraphrases” supplied when the difference had become clear.

I’m wrestling with this concept, looking forward to the book to be sure I have it right.

Meanwhile, there’s another “pious story” that must also be abandoned. “It is to say that the Council fathers were personally sound and merely wrote ambiguous texts that were later abused by unscrupulous interpreters.”

Which the writer doesn’t swallow.

“No doubt,” he says, there were many bishops who signed out of confusion, fear, habit, or misplaced trust. Yet there were also men who consciously wanted a break with the doctrine and discipline of the past, and who used pastoral language as a crowbar to pry the door open.

Say it isn’t so!

The record is “not one of pure intentions tragically misunderstood.”

Nope, it’s “a mixture of naivety and calculation, of sincere but misguided optimism and deliberate subversion. The crisis is therefore not only metaphysical or semantic. It is also moral.”

And thus the iron is dropped. Rats were in the pantry.

Vatican II must be studied, then, not as a random series of unfortunate interpretations, but as a chosen redirection of language and emphasis that many of its leading actors knew would have concrete consequences.

The bad guys, no doubt about it.

For some, that redirection was the whole point. They wanted liberty where the Church had once spoken of duty, dialogue where she had spoken of conversion, and “openness” where she had once insisted on guarding the flock.

Revolution, no doubt about it.

When eternal things are translated into modern idioms, they do not remain untouched in the process.

Language matters.

A mystery that is made “relevant” ceases to be mysterious.

Who needs mystery? Who’s in charge here, anyhow? Stick with the here and now, people. Something we know about.

A Church that begs to be understood begins to sound like a body asking the world’s permission to exist.

Has to prove itself, you know.

This book . . .

. . . follows the logic of the revolution it describes. Part One reconstructs the historical setting of the Council: the twilight of Pius XII, the election of John XXIII, preconciliar theological currents, machinery of the preparatory commissions, political maneuvers that sank their work.

Looking ahead to read about that.

Part Two . . .four constitutions. . . on the Church . . . liturgy . . . revelation . . . the Church in the modern world.

The decrees . . .

. . . where theory begins to govern the life of priests, religious, missionaries, and laity.

The declarations . . .

. . . in which the revolution speaks most openly . . . of religious liberty, ecumenism, and non-Christian religions.

More to come, one more item actually . . . Patience! . . .

The tackling of Vatican 2, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . .

Vatican II: The Anatomy of a Revolution Chris Jackson Dec 08, 2025

“If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?” — 1 Corinthians 14:8

It begins.

When the Second Vatican Council opened on an autumn morning in 1962, the Church still looked like a fortress that time had forgotten.

Latin rose from the altars like incense from a thousand years of continuity.

The same catechism that instructed peasants in Poland trained seminarians in Rome.

Priests spoke with the confidence of men who believed Heaven backed their every word.

The papal tiara still glimmered under the dome of Saint Peter’s, and Catholics still thought of it as a crown, not a costume piece.

But something new was in the works.

A few years later, the same Church seemed to wake up in a funhouse mirror. The tiara disappeared into a museum case; the language of sacrifice became the language of community; priests turned to face the people and discovered, too late, that the people had turned their backs.

The tree had not fallen, but the trunk had cracked, and the draft of a new religion . . . . insisted it was the old one.

Pastoral, they said.

The Council called itself such, promising to update without altering, reform without revolt. But claiming to be pastoral while leaving doctrine untouched invited the question, why did everything change?

Vatican II “did not invent heresy. but . . . loosened definitions so that almost anything could fit.

. . . . dogma became dialogue; what had been salvation became accompaniment. The Church began to explain herself to the world and, in the process, forgot to explain the world’s need for conversion.

Was aiming to please. Pity that.

None of this holier than thou stuff, this claiming to have the last word.

Here is a book that . . .

. . . examines . . . texts as a surgeon studies the tissue of a failed transplant, probing where the graft took, where the body rejected it, and where infection set in.

Author has no time for whether the Council “meant well.”

“Revolutions always mean well, at least for those who lead them.

Instead, he asks

whether the faith handed down from the Apostles could survive being rewritten in the grammar of modern man administered by men who increasingly preferred that grammar to the language of tradition.

I like that. They would hold the traditional to a test.

Woe.

The book is “not an elegy but an autopsy,” written for people who “consider the corpse worth examining, if only to understand how it died, who “suspect that somewhere under the rubble, the heart of the true Church still beats, awaiting resurrection”!

The church is dead, long live the church. Ouch.

Tricky business here, author is making the case for it with this book.

The Council introduced itself as an act of mercy. It would not condemn but invite; not define but dialogue — offer topics for discussion.

Its fathers “promised renewal without rupture, the Church speaking at last to the modern world in a language it could understand.”

Bold men.

Sixty years later, even many of its defenders concede that the result was bewildering.

We were promised a fresh spring; we received a long thaw in which the old forms remained on paper while the substance drained away.

The writer has put in years of picking apart what’s been said and done. Here he draws conclusions, for the reader to buy or dismiss.

“The trumpet sounded,” he tells us, “but the note was uncertain . . . ”

“This book begins from a simple proposition,” he writes. “Every Catholic generation receives a deposit, not a draft.

“Doctrine grows as a living thing grows, from the same root and in the same species.”

He gets mysterious here.

“It may branch, flower, and bear fruit, but it does not change into another plant.”

The council is when “the Church began to describe herself in categories drawn from the modern mind rather than from revelation and metaphysics.”

Its documents “replaced the vertical grammar of grace and sin with a horizontal grammar of experience and dialogue.”

Palpably so.

“The supernatural order was not flatly denied, but was absorbed into the language of psychology, history, and sociology, where it could be reinterpreted . . .”

This was to mess with Mister In Between, the opposite of accentuating the positive, too much too soon ascribing a hurtful, if not damnable, rethinking’ in which the faith “still wore the old vestments, but spoke a new dialect, one that made obedience sound like conversation and salvation sound like personal fulfillment.”

Go light on the hard stuff, my friend, let smooth be the tone.

Salvation? Says so much, as if something were so radically wrong that needed fixing. Fulfillment is better. We can live with that.

— More to come, of course —

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Month: December 2025

Stunning analysis of ongoing civil war in holy Catholic church.