Chapter 30 - FILL IN HERE

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Vatican II, Triumph of Catholic Liberalism

I do not think that anyone can accuse me of exaggeration when I say that the Council was the triumph of liberal ideas. The preceding topics have sufficiently displayed the facts: the liberal tendencies, the tactics and the successes of the liberals at the Council, and finally their pacts with the enemies of the Church.

Besides, the Liberals themselves, the liberal Catholics, proclaim that Vatican II was their victory. In his conversation with Vittorio Messori, Cardinal Ratzinger, former periti of a liberal mind at the Council, explains how Vatican II posed and resolved the problem of the assimilation of liberal principles by the Catholic Church; he does not say that that led to an admirable success, but he affirms that this assimilation was accomplished:

The problem of the 1960s was to acquire the best expressed values of two centuries of liberal culture. These are in fact values which, even if they were born outside the Church, can find their place—purified and corrected—in its vision of the world. This is what has been done.1

Where was this done? At the Council, to be sure, which ratified the liberal principles in Gaudium et spes and Dig-nitatis humanæ. How was this done? By an attempt dedicated to failure, a squaring of the circle: to marry the Church to the principles of the Revolution. This was precisely the aim and the illusion of the liberal Catholics.

Cardinal Ratzinger does not boast too much of this undertaking; he even judges the result with some severity:

Now the climate is different; it has indeed grown worse in comparison with the one which justified an optimism that was no doubt ingenuous. A new balance now must be sought.2

The desired balance has not yet been found, twenty years later! It is still being sought: this is indeed forever the liberal illusion!

Other liberal Catholics, in contrast, are not so pessimistic; they openly celebrate victory: the Council is our victory. Read for example the work of Mr. Marcel Prélot, senator from Doubs, on the history of liberal Catholicism.3 The author begins by contrasting two quotations, one from Paul VI, the other from Lamennais, the comparison of the two being significant. Here is what Paul VI says in his conciliar message to the governors (I believe that I have already quoted this text to you), on December 8, 1965:

What does it ask of you, this Church, after almost two thousand years of vicissitudes of all sorts in its relations with you, the powers of the earth; what does it ask of you today? It has told you in one of the major texts of this Council: it asks of you only liberty.

Here is what Lamennais wrote, for a prospectus intended to make his newspaper L’Avenir known:

All the friends of religion should understand that it needs only one single thing: liberty.

Thus, you see: with Lamennais, as with Vatican II, it is the same liberal principle of “liberty alone”: no privilege for the truth, for Our Lord Jesus Christ, for the Catholic Church. No! The same liberty for all: for error as for the truth, for Mohammed as for Jesus Christ. Is this not the profession of the purest Liberalism (called Catholic)?

Marcel Prélot next recalls the history of this Liberalism right up to its triumph at Vatican II:

Catholic Liberalism…knows victory; it pierces with the circular letter of Eckstein in 1814; it flashes with the soaring of l’Avenir in the autumn of 1830; it knows victories, alternating with crises; until the message of Vatican II to the governors marks its end: its fundamental claims, put to the test and purified, were accepted by the Council itself. Therefore, it is possible today to contemplate liberal Catholicism, as it is in itself at last, changed over the ages. It avoids the confusions which have obstructed its course, which, at certain times, have nearly ended it. It seems thus, that it was really not a series of pious illusions, professed by diaphanous and ghostly shadows, but like a powerful thought, having, in the course of a century and a half, taken its hold on the minds and on the laws, before receiving the final welcome of that Church which it had so well served, but by which it had been so often unappreciated.

This confirms exactly what we are saying: Vatican II is the Council of the triumph of Liberalism.

The same confirmation is to be had by reading the book of Mr. Yves Marsaudon, Ecumenism Viewed by a Traditional Freemason, written during the Council. Marsaudon knows what he is saying:

The Christians must not forget, before all else, that every path leads to God…and must continue in this courageous idea of freedom of thought, which—one can now speak of revolution, setting out from our Masonic lodges—has expanded itself gloriously above the dome of Saint Peter’s.

He triumphs. As for us, we weep! He adds these lines, terrible but still true:

When Pius XII decided to direct the very important ministry of Foreign Affairs himself, the Secretary of State, Msgr. Montini was elevated to the extremely burdensome post of archbishop of the largest diocese in Italy, Milan; but he did not receive the purple. It became not impossible canonically, but difficult from tradition, that at the death of Pius XII he should accede to the supreme Pontificate. It is for this reason that a man came, who, like the Precursor, was called John; and everything began to change.

This man, a Freemason and therefore Liberal, spoke the truth: all their ideas, for which they had struggled a century and a half, were confirmed by the Council. These liberties—liberty of thought, of conscience, and of worship—were written down at this Council, with the religious liberty of Dignitatis humanæ and the objection of conscience of Gaudium et spes. This has happened not by chance but thanks to men, infected themselves with Liberalism, who have ascended to the See of Peter and have made use of their power to impose these errors onto the Church. Yes, truly, the Council of Vatican II is the ratification of liberal Catholicism. However, it is remembered that Pope Pius IX, eighty-five years earlier, said and repeated to those who were visiting him in Rome, “Be careful! There are no worse enemies of the Church than the liberal Catholics!"—then can be measured the catastrophe that such liberal popes and such a Council represent for the Church and for the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ!

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1 Gesu, November, 1984, p. 72.

2 Ibid.

3 Armand Colin Ed.