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! . . .