The Second Vatican Council Reconsidered

Did the Second Vatican Council betray Roman Christianity? Or did the Holy Spirit inspire the fathers of the council to dare a radical restart of the Church? Few ecclesiastical events of the twentieth century have generated as much controversy as the Second Vatican Council. More than sixty years after its conclusion, Vatican II still continues to divide Catholics, theologians, and observers of the fate of Western civilisation. For some, it represents a necessary aggiornamento, a courageous opening of the Church to modernity, which allowed Christianity to survive in a rapidly changing world and to flourish in parts of Africa and Asia even after the end of colonialism, when it seemed for a while all traces of Western traditional presence would be ejected. For others, it marks the beginning of a dramatic loss of substance, authority, and form, accelerating the collapse of religious practice and belief throughout Europe, the old core territories of the Catholic faith.

To understand Vatican II, one must first try to recall the intellectual and emotional climate of the early 1960s, so different from what we are experiencing now. The Second World War, with its moral devastation and its discrediting of Europe’s traditional elites, lay scarcely fifteen years in the past, ruins still all around, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe. The future seemed to belong to the great ideological confrontation between liberal and socialist materialism, both animated by an almost obsessive faith in progress and human omnipotence and with only limited sympathy for retrograde beliefs. Furthermore, a tremendous generational revolt was underway, challenging authority, tradition, and inherited norms, while decolonisation movements in Asia and Africa shattered the remains of European civilisational supremacy and fostered a renewed pride in non-European cultures and their religious traditions. In this context, many within the Church felt that Western Christianity itself had become historically compromised—associated with nationalism, colonialism, bourgeois morality, and an old world that seemed irrevocably doomed.

It is therefore unsurprising that numerous churchmen sought to respond to the destabilisation of the West with an equally radical reconstruction of the Church, a reconstruction that targeted not only the Catholic Church but also the Protestant denominations, though in the case of the latter, the reform went on in a more organic way. In an age of brutalist architecture, skyscrapers, gulags, and space travel, they all looked for renewal not in the traditional imagery of the ecclesia triumphans, which many associated with an increasingly incomprehensible nineteenth century, but in the exposed concrete of modernity, the rhetoric of constant self-justification, and the emotional warmth of scout guitars, social pastoralism, and participatory liturgy.

And it is precisely here, in the attitude towards history, that the fundamental and frankly astonishing error of Vatican II becomes apparent. For the council’s original sin was not a fundamental lack of faith but a profound lack of historical understanding, probably one of the last things one would have expected from an institution so steeped in history, tradition and continuity that its capacity of thinking and handling time not in years, but in generations, even centuries, had become proverbial. The Council of Trent, convened in response to the Reformation, took an impressive eighteen years to articulate a thoughtful and coherent answer, while all around, Europe seemed to fall apart and urgency was—or should have been—the utmost priority. And crucially, it did not respond to those challenges by imitating Protestantism but by clarifying, affirming, and sublimating precisely those aspects that had been attacked. The Roman rite was standardised rather than fragmented into national variants; sacred art was consciously cultivated as a dignified and splendid framework for the contemplation of God rather than replaced by iconoclastic austerity; doctrine was sharpened, not relativised; mission aimed at reconverting the lost sheep rather than affirming that everyone might be saved ‘in their own way’; the liturgy reached a fully composed symbolic richness instead of being reduced to a supposed essence; religious orders were renewed, not dissolved; the clergy was subjected to stricter discipline rather than emancipated from authority.

In 1965, the opposite occurred. After barely three years of discussion, the Church launched a general overhaul from which it has not recovered even sixty years after. That such a deeply un-Catholic haste could sweep through the universal Church, and that the conciliar fathers were willing not merely to permit but actively to encourage an unprecedented process of self-deconstruction, suggests an uncomfortable truth: the crisis did not originate with Vatican II. The worm was already in the apple, and the council was not the cause of the Church’s collapse but its symptom.

Obviously, this insight does not absolve the Council from its responsibility, but it situates Vatican II within a broader civilisational pattern. Just as 1789 did not suddenly destroy the Church’s social authority—something that would have been impossible without a far deeper crisis of the ecclesiastical Ancien Régime—so it would be misleading to attribute the present implosion solely to the Council, and it is significant that parallel developments can be observed across all Protestant denominations, which underwent even more radical, though smoother, forms of modernisation with similarly catastrophic results.

In order to understand such tremendous mutations, one needs to adopt a macrohistorical comparative perspective, and from such a standpoint, the development of Christianity in the later stages of the European civilisation is hardly unique, as every civilisation in its late phase experiences a marked decline in its ancestral religious structures. Whether one considers the pagan cults of the late Roman Republic, the Chinese ancestor rituals during the Warring States period, the Mazdean religion of the late Sasanian period or the Egyptian cults of the New Kingdom, the pattern is strikingly consistent. A religion that once formed the backbone of an entire society gradually ossifies, is relativised by rationalism, modernism, exoticism, and nihilism, and eventually appears to vanish or to be replaced by competing belief systems. Christianity, insofar as it is historically intertwined with the destiny of Western civilisation, is not exempt from this logic, history seems to suggest.

Fortunately, this does not mean that Christianity itself is doomed. Like Buddhism, which found new centres of vitality in China, Southeast Asia, and Japan long after its decline in India, Christianity will almost certainly survive the doom of Europe even if it fails in reasserting its spiritual dominance over the old continent, though this is a poor consolation for the Europeans themselves and does by no means relieve them of their responsibility. For disappearance is not the only option: most civilisations, in their final phase, also seem to experience what might be called an “Augustan restoration”—a last, retrospective flowering in which form, tradition, and meaning are consciously reaffirmed and canonised, so that the old belief—sometimes—succeeds in surviving the tempest of civilisational fossilisation for many centuries, even millennia. The question is whether Western Christianity will be capable of such a restoration that would only be possible within the framework of a more general Hesperialist patriotic revival.

Seen from this angle, Vatican II may paradoxically appear as a ruse of history—or even of the Holy Spirit. By introducing a hermeneutics of rupture instead of continuity, it forced the Church to confront the question of what is truly essential. Few events in ecclesiastical history have clarified so sharply what is eternal in the faith: not social-revolutionary activism, but the individual’s journey toward God; not perpetual theological innovation, but continuity across centuries and millennia; not embarrassing accommodation to the cultural Zeitgeist, but the preservation of a supra-personal and timeless form; not emotional hysteria, but serene contemplation of the immutable. And above all, the Council has once again shown what the people of the Middle Ages had been so keenly aware of: faith is eternal, but the church institutions can be misled, so that no individual believer is ever exempted from involving himself wholeheartedly in the pursuit of unity with God.

Indeed, the consequences of the rupture within the faith are now becoming visible to even the most naïve observers. The post-conciliar Church may have spoken to parts of the baby-boomer generation, but its obsession with the aesthetics, the rhetoric, and the concerns of that cohort has rendered it largely unintelligible to younger people. This is true not only of people from a mainstream Catholic background but also of converts, who all increasingly seek transcendence in the traditional liturgy rather than in its modern counterpart: This may lead to a real revolution, as sociological data consistently show that young Catholics attached to the old rite tend to be more orthodox, more disciplined, and often more conscious of their cultural and national identity.

It is therefore no coincidence that traditional Masses are frequently overcrowded, while the reformed liturgy struggles to attract worshippers, despite—or perhaps because of—its relentless pursuit of political and media relevance. The Roman Church thus finds itself in a tragic dilemma. A large part of the older clergy invested its credibility in the defence of the conciliar reforms, making a return to tradition psychologically and institutionally difficult: no one in his late life likes to publicly admit his errors of youth. Understandably, this petrification of the Conciliar Church has led both to open schisms and to the marginalisation of the old rite within ecclesiastical life, yet demographic reality is inexorable. Within a few decades, a significant proportion of priests and faithful will once again celebrate the Mass ad orientem, with all that this implies for the civilisational orientation of the Una Sancta.

At stake here is more than liturgical preference. The desacralisation of worship also has political consequences. A Church that abandons transcendence inevitably loses its capacity to resist secular power. As Joseph Ratzinger—later Benedict XVI—repeatedly warned, a Christianity that dissolves itself into ethics, sociology, or humanitarian activism becomes redundant in a world that can provide these functions more efficiently through the state or NGOs. Liturgy and dogma, by contrast, are forms of resistance: they embody a beauty, a truth, a goodness and an order not of this world and remind both ruler and subjects that terrestrial power is never absolute.

In this sense, the crisis of Vatican II mirrors the broader crisis of Western civilisation. The loss of sacred form goes hand in hand with the erosion of authority, hierarchy, and meaning. Yet precisely because the decline is now so advanced, the conditions for a genuine restoration may be emerging. The future of Christianity in Europe will not be decided by committees or pastoral strategies, but by the rediscovery of the sacred as the axis around which both personal life and civilisation itself must once again revolve.