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 —