One of the two ultimate guardrails of stability in American politics is about to be tested. The burning question now is whether the Democrats will use the Department of Justice to try to defeat the renascent force of Donald Trump with politically motivated indictments.
This was almost certainly the inspiration for the asinine and outrageous intrusion at the former president’s home in Palm Beach. The controversy over that caper enabled President Joe Biden to cut his disapproval margin by approximately half to a deficit of only 10 percent. But Trump won a tactical success in shunting the issue to a special master, which has quieted it down through to the election. Last week, a former U.S. prosecutor told MSNBC that she expected Trump to be indicted over his attempt to persuade then Vice President Mike Pence not to certify Electoral College results presented by some of the contested jurisdictions.
All litigation is a craps game; American federal prosecutors win 98 percent of their cases, 95 percent of those without a trial, because of the immense practical advantages that they have through the plea bargain system over even a very well-founded defense. And in any jury trial in the District of Columbia, it’s effectively a criminal offense just to be a Republican, as the Democrats routinely carry over 90 percent of the vote in D.C. in presidential elections. Disgraced FBI Director James Comey chose to overlook Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s destruction of 33,000 subpoenaed emails ahead of the 2016 election—a possibly far more serious breach of the law than anything that could remotely be conjured from Trump’s conduct.
But this argument that Trump criminally mishandled documents that he took with him when he departed as president is spurious, as is the nonsense that Trump himself committed any offenses on Jan. 6, 2021. Some of the militantly anti-Trump legal experts have torqued themselves up to cheerlead for a slam-dunk legal victory if they just indict the ex-president. This is bunk on the legal merits, and it would crash through one of the guardrails of the American political system, that prominent politicians and especially ex-presidents are not subjected to frivolous and vexatious, politically motivated indictments.
Such an initiative now would be the ultimate criminalization of electoral politics and would ring a fire bell that the entire constitutional system is in acute danger. The supreme crisis of the post-Reagan bipartisan and political establishment is almost at hand.
The other ultimate guardrail of political stability is that the judiciary won’t entertain overturning the apparent result of a presidential election. This was demonstrated in the Bush-Gore election of 2000, and again in 2020, when at all levels the courts refused to judge the merits of the constitutional arguments in 19 lawsuits over voting and vote-counting changes effected in swing states and allegedly contravening the constitutional assignment of the obligation of fair presidential elections to the state legislatures, and that, in selected states, those elections weren’t fair. (These suits are not to be compared to the wild goose chases of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell.)
The greatest nightmare of the post-Reagan bipartisan political establishment has returned. The Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, Biden, Romney, and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell all thought they had seen the last of their Trump nightmare after the 2020 election, and comforted themselves with the fact that the ogre couldn’t return. Anti-Trump commentators scolded Republican officeholders for being too afraid of Trump voters—they had convinced themselves that Trump had become a melting electoral iceberg.
When Trump-supported candidates won almost all of the Republican primaries, the thought that Trump might be more than a freakish and evanescent apparition startled them out of their complacent torpor.
Trump’s support isn’t so fragile, and the assault of the Washington “swamp” isn’t a passing aversion. He, almost alone, saw in 2016 the proportions of the disillusionment and anger of the lower half of American income earners, and he exploited this anger in sweeping almost all of the Republican primaries in all regions of the country and winning an astounding upset victory in the general election.
He wrenched the Republican Party away from the proverbial country clubs and placed it like a great hen on top of traditional Democratic fiefdoms of Hispanics and African Americans and generally disadvantaged voters, and made huge inroads in these areas by the application of vintage capitalism to poor districts—incentivizing investments there and cutting taxes.
Despite out-spending Trump 2-to-1 and having the often rabid support of 95 percent of the national political media, the Democrats had to have recourse to profound changes in voting and vote-counting rules—potentially millions of allegedly harvested ballots couldn’t be verified as authentic, and a switch of fewer than 50,000 votes in three states would have flipped the Electoral College to Trump.
The almost totalitarian effort to stamp out any question about the 2020 result has failed. “Election deniers” are approximately half the country, and their numbers will grow when a Republican House of Representatives lifts the rock on some of the Democratic skullduggeries. This will be the merit of the Durham Report—it has been a failure at judicial retribution, but it will be a horrifying embarrassment to the Democrats.
The most perceptive analysis of these matters in the past few days came from J.R. Dunn writing in the American Thinkeron Oct. 5. He referred to what he considered a “slow, dull-witted, and utterly inept” effort by the bipartisan political establishment to stage the greatest American bloodless assassination since Watergate.
He cited a series of events showing the brutish lawlessness of Trump’s frightened enemies: the raid at the former president’s house, the doubling of the size of the IRS and the recruitment by it of gunmen “willing to use lethal force,” and Biden’s nonsensically histrionic speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a few feet from where Benjamin Franklin allegedly said at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1788 that Americans would have “ARepublic, if you can keep it.”
He also made the point that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reaction to the invasion of the former president’s house was inadequate. He could have ordered the state police not to cooperate with the FBI raid, and instead of condemning it, he blandly insinuated that it was excessive.
For all those who think that the OBushinton era and the ghastly Biden revival of it has failed and must be replaced by an administration that will uproot the Washington establishment as Andrew Jackson did in 1829, and will reorient the country in all major policy areas, Donald Trump is the only candidate.
Only he will lower taxes, close up the border again, end the sanctuary cities, eliminate unemployment through investment and tax incentives, and redefine legitimate national interests in the world in agreement with paid-up allies and supported by strongly motivated Armed Forces with a non-political senior officer corps and armed to the teeth with the most efficient weapons in the world.
If the Trump-backed Senate candidates win two of Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in three weeks, Trump is the almost certain Republican nominee. And a malicious and unjust indictment will ultimately assure his election as president. Even the unaccountable and over-armed U.S. prosecution service won’t get away with what the desperate Democrats are contemplating.
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Above: Pope Paul VI with one of his greatest critics, Joseph Ratzinger, whom he appoint bishop and then cardinal in 1977 before his death.
When Vatican II Turned Forty
Twenty years ago, a week before the fortieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, Mr George Weigel, a great admirer of that assembly, wrote an assessment of it for, of all publications, the National Catholic Reporter. The basic thrust of his column is simple: a reading of Vatican II as a power struggle within the Church is incorrect. He does not deny that the Church has collectively “got(ten) Vatican II wrong” in many ways, and did so “by thinking of it chiefly in terms of church politics.” But in “the council’s masterwork,” Lumen Gentium, we see that “(t)he universal call to holiness, not the struggle for ecclesiastical power, was the central motif of Vatican II.” This is both true and a good thing to say, especially in a publication so deeply invested in reading Vatican II and its aftermath as a series of power struggles: of bishops against an overcentralized papacy and curia; of heretical theologians against bishops; and ultimately, of Modern Man™ against the Faith once delivered to the Saints.
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But twenty years ago, Mr Weigel was still able to entertain some doubts as to the ultimate fate of Vatican II in the Church’s life, and he goes on to say:
I’ve been much struck recently by the question of whether, in the mid-third millennium, Vatican II will be remembered as another Lateran V or another Trent. Lateran V was a reforming council that failed; Trent was a reforming council whose success defined Catholic life for almost four centuries. Lateran V’s failure was one cause of the fracture of Western Christianity in the Reformation – and thus of the wars of religion, the rise of the modern state, and the gradual erosion of Christian culture in Europe. Getting it wrong, in this business of conciliar reform, can carry high costs.
With all due respect, this question was put incorrectly. By its 40th anniversary, Vatican II was already neither another Lateran V nor another Trent.
Trent began in 1545, which puts its fortieth anniversary in the 1585. By that point, the Church had already made huge strides in implementing the reforms which it had ordered, and the movement to continue doing so was gaining strength every day, with the strong leadership and support of the Papacy. The spread of Protestantism had been checked in much of Europe, and reversed in some places; the evangelization of the New World was proceeding apace. New religious orders such as the Jesuits and Oratorians were thriving and spreading, and inspiring the older ones to highly successful reforms. The model of Counter-Reformation bishops, St Charles Borromeo, was still alive, and a leading figure in the implementation of the Council’s decrees.
It hardly needs saying that forty years out from Vatican II, the Church was not thriving as it was in 1585.
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On the other hand, the fortieth anniversary of Lateran V occurred in 1552… smack in the middle of the Council of Trent. Forty years after Lateran V had failed so spectacularly to bring about any of the reform that the Church so desperately needed (and by so failing, had helped to trigger the Reformation), the Church did not content itself with monomaniacal repetition of the catchphrase, “You have to accept Lateran V!”, while ignoring the fact that everything was burning down around it. Rather, it recognized that its previous feint at reform had failed catastrophically, and set about at Trent to do well what it had done badly at Lateran V.
It hardly needs saying that forty years out from Vatican II, the Church wasn’t doing this either.
The truest parallel with Vatican II to be found among the ecumenical councils is that of Constance (1414-18), the highwater mark of the Conciliarist movement, which taught that the ecumenical council as an institution is superior in authority to the Pope. (i.e., a power-struggle: so ironic…) A wave of enthusiasm for something new, something which everyone hopes will bring great benefit to the Church, is quickly followed by a sudden and almost inexplicable dissipation of that enthusiasm. Just as the bishops who attended Constance did not bother to attend the next council which they themselves had called for, the bishops who wrote (with their periti) and approved the documents of Vatican II seemed afterwards to care little or nothing for what they had written.
Weigel himself acknowledges as much in the same column.
I never seriously read the texts of Vatican II until the mid-1970s, despite eight years in high school and college seminary and two years of graduate studies in theology. I don’t think I was alone in this. [No, he most certainly wasn’t.] In those days, one read about the council … (but) one didn’t wrestle with the texts of the council itself.
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I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why I or anyone else should show an enthusiasm for the texts of Vatican II which their own authors never showed, but Mr Weigel’s enthusiasm for them, at any rate, knows no abatement.
When Vatican II Turned Fifty
Ten years after the aforementioned column, it was time to commemorate the council’s golden anniversary; the venue changed to an incommensurably more Catholic publication, First Things, and so did the tack. In a very brief article, he notes (how could one not?) that “Vatican II is sometimes imagined to be an example of ecclesiastical parthenogenesis: the Council just happened, absent significant antecedents, in a decisive rupture with the past.” But this imagining is incorrect: Popes since Leo XIII, he tells us, had been coming to grips with modernity, and Vatican II was, or was supposed to be, the culmination of this engagement.
However, the future reception of Vatican II is no longer to be understood by looking at any previous council.
[It] was like no other ecumenical Council in history, in that it did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation: the Council Fathers wrote no creed, condemned no heresy, legislated no new canons, defined no dogmas. Thus the decade and a half after the Council ended on December 8, 1965, was a bit of a free-for-all, as varying interpretations of the Council (including appeals to an amorphous ‘spirit of Vatican II’ that seems to have more in common with low-church Protestantism than with Catholicism) contended with each other in what amounted to an ecclesiastical civil war.
Just “a bit of a free-for-all,” he writes, like a British general of a sang particularly froid describing the Second World War. (Fifty years from the opening of Lateran V, by the way, brings us to the opening of the third and final session of Trent; fifty years from the opening of Trent, and Rome is getting ready to celebrate its second Jubilee of the Counter-Reformation.) Why the free-for-all? Because the Council “did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation.” Is it cynical to ask whether this was really a wise procedure for a body whose very raison-d’être is to bring much needed clarity to the Church?
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Never fear. The free-for-all is over, because
Providence raised up two men of genius, John Paul II and Benedict XVI… to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation (and) the truth about the Council. … Vatican II did not displace the Church’s tradition. Vatican II did not create do-it-yourself-Catholicism.
What a relief.
When Vatican II Turned Sixty
Now, another ten years have passed, and any doubts Mr Weigel might once have entertained about the place of Vatican II in the Church’s future life have evaporated as thoroughly as… well, as thoroughly as the enthusiasm of the world’s bishops for Vatican II did after December 8, 1965. In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, he brands it “the most important Catholic event in half a millennium.” From the Council’s own starting date, that brings us back to 1462, fifty years before Lateran V began; from our present year, back to 1522, five years after Lateran V ended and the Protestant Reformation began. Were it not for the previous assurance that Vatican II is like no other council, and historical parallelism thus dismissed, some might find this worrisome.
It is no longer a question of whether Vatican II will be seen in the future as a successful council like Trent or a failed one like Lateran V. The title of the column, published in advance of a book on the subject released one week before the anniversary, is simply “What Vatican II Accomplished.” As in “Mission Accomplished”?
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What a relief.
The sub-header, however, does not briefly summarize these achievements, but like the column itself, brings in the boogeymen, assuring us that “progressives and nostalgic traditionalists” have misunderstood the Council. Vatican II turns out to be as singularly unlucky in its application as socialism, communism, and the other disgusting -isms of the 20th century which it so conspicuously failed to condemn. “If only we had REAL socialism…”
If the job of a sub-header is to summarize a column, John Daniel Davidson of the Federalistwrote this sentence about this column that would have served the purpose far better. “Every positive development in Catholicism since 1965 is because of Vatican II; every distortion or pathology is a misapplication of Vatican II.”
For we are assured by Weigel that
From his historical studies and pastoral experience, John XXIII knew that the defensive Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, however successful a salvage operation, had run its course. It was time to raze the bastions that Catholicism had erected and turn its robust institutions into platforms for evangelization and mission in order to engage a deeply troubled modern world.
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And in brief, despite whatever difficulties the Church may be undergoing right now, or may have been undergoing for the last several decades, this is what the Council has purportedly achieved.
The Pope of the Council
This is one of 19 mentions of Pope John by name, in a column of just under 2100 words, which is an average of about one every 110 words. The unknowing reader might be forgiven for getting the impression that the Council itself was actually his work and faithful to his intentions. But Weigel himself knows this to be untrue, and carefully describes those intentions in the conditional mood:
In his opening address to Vatican II, John XXIII suggested how ecclesiastical renewal would take place. … the Church would develop the means to express ancient and enduring truths in ways that modernity could hear. … his hope that Vatican II would be a ‘new Pentecost.’
By this sleight of hand, the Pope who called Vatican II becomes something like a large, disembodied head, floating above the floor and loudly proclaiming, “I! AM!! JOHN!!! The great and powerful!” Wicked, nostalgic traditionalists, get away from that curtain…
Missing from this and so many other discourses about the reception of the Council and its purported achievements is Paul VI, the Pope in whose reign all of the Council’s documents were promulgated, and who, by his action and inaction over the years that followed it, “implemented” it in ways that thoroughly betrayed those documents, and the intentions of Pope John. Even twenty years ago, when the future reception of Vatican II was still a matter of uncertainty, he merited from Weigel no more than a passing mention in reference to his 1965 visit to the U.N., (an institution which constitutes one of the most conspicuous among Modern Man™’s great and ghastly political failures). By the fiftieth anniversary, he had been thrown down the memory hole. Did the decade and a half which Mr Weigel describes as a “bit of a free-for-all” after the end of Vatican II happen to coincide with anything in particular?
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Get away from that curtain!
Now, at the sixtieth anniversary, in telling us “What Vatican II Accomplished,” Mr Weigel gives us not a hint of who specifically steered it towards its accomplishments. We must not think of Vatican II as an instance of “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis,” but we are left free to think of its documents as products of spontaneous generation, without father, without mother, and without genealogy.
To rehearse these “achievements” in detail would be as unbearably tedious for you to read as it would be for me to write. I will therefore limit myself to commenting on the first which Mr Weigel enumerates, one which happily coincides with my own area of interest and, such as it is, expertise.
He tells us that “After Vatican II, Catholics worshiped in their own languages, rather than in Latin.” But he does not tell us that the general post-Conciliar abandonment of Latin happened in direct contradiction of the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia, which John XXIII promulgated eight months before Vatican II: an “achievement,”in Weigel’s presentation, “without father.”
He does not tell us that the all-vernacular liturgy was brought about in direct contradiction to Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which states that the use of Latin was to be preserved in the liturgy.
“Without mother.”
He does not tell us that when a Sicilian bishop urged the Council Fathers to be cautious about accepting liturgical use of the vernacular, lest a partial permission turn into a Mass with no Latin at all, there was a brief pause, followed by an explosion of laughter, so absurd did the very idea seem to them.
He does not tell us that the Council’s other fifteen documents contain only one brief mention of Latin, precisely because it was taken for granted that Veterum Sapientia had fully dealt with the subject, and there was no need to say any more. Nor indeed could any of them have imagined that any Pope would so cavalierly ignore such an act of his predecessor.
On November 26, 1969, at the last general audience before the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, Paul VI informed the Church that although Latin would no longer be the principal language of the Mass, it would “remain as the means of teaching in ecclesiastical studies and as the key to the patrimony of our religious, historical and human culture. If possible, it will reflourish in splendor.” Mr Weigel does not tell us that that is exactly what John XXIII ordered in Veterum Sapientia, or that none of that happened either.
“Without genealogy.”
As a segue, he tells us that the Council “urg(ed) Catholics to become more biblically literate.” He does not tell us that the Holy See under Paul VI stayed mostly silent as Catholic Biblical scholars introduced all the most fatuous excesses of modern Biblical scholarship into Catholic seminaries and schools, from which they slithered down into sermons and catechism classes. Nor are we told that the revised lectionary of the post-Conciliar Mass routinely censors and violently mispresents the word of God. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum says that “with maternal concern, the Church sees to it that suitable and correct translations are made into different languages,” but we are not told that the official translation used for the Biblical readings at Mass in the United States is the “colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase” known as the New American Bible, nor that it is full of the most gruesome errors.
Sad tales of this sort can and have been told repeatedly about every aspect of the Church’s life over the last 60 years, and they all amount to pretty much the same thing.
The Church lives as it lives now very largely because Paul VI rejected and did not fulfill the will of the Second Vatican Council.
Twenty years ago, Weigel’s rhetorical combination of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi did perhaps serve a legitimate function, not as history or theology, but as propaganda.[1] It encouraged us to believe in one possible understanding of Vatican II, of how it ought to have been implemented, and the prior implementation of it corrected. Whatever the flaws of this understanding may have been, it was certainly better than Paul VI’s. As a priest friend of mine put it to me in mid-2013, “the background radiation (in the Church) was dying down.” St John Paul II and Benedict XVI unquestionably deserve a great deal of the credit for that. Ten years ago, the last full year of Benedict’s reign, it was fully plausible that their far healthier version of Vatican II might prevail, and the worst excesses of the Paul VI years would simply fade into the past and be gently, deservedly forgotten.
Revolution Reborn
But this was before the election of Francis, a man of a very different spirit, who has canonized John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, but revived the ghost of only one of them. The first Pope to never serve as a priest in the Church as it was before the Montinian revolution is committed to that revolution as Papa Montini himself never was. That brings with it a commitment to a violent, revolutionary interpretation of Vatican II, and all that goes with it: the power struggles which Weigel rejected twenty years ago, the “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis” which he rejected ten years ago, and many other interpretations of Vatican II which he deems inauthentic.
I would be utterly remiss were I not to say that Catholics ought to be sincerely grateful to Mr Weigel for speaking out against this as he has in recent times. Despite no evident fondness for the traditional Roman liturgy, he rightly decried the “Liberal Authoritarianism” of Traditionis Custodes, and rightly branded it “theologically incoherent, pastorally divisive, unnecessary, cruel – and a sorry example of the liberal bullying that has become all too familiar in Rome recently.” When the responses to the so-called dubia about TC followed, he pointed out the absurdity of “Undercutting Vatican II to Defend Vatican II” by issuing orders to the bishops wholly contrary to the spirit of Lumen Gentium. He has repeatedly denounced the de facto revival of Paul VI’s Ostpolitik in the Vatican’s current dealings with the single most murderous organization in human history, the Chinese Communist Party. He has called the recent developments in the Pontifical Academy for Life a second assassination attempt against John Paul II.
And this is all to the good.
As important as these matters are, however, they do not lie at the heart of the Vatican II problem.
Ten years ago, Mr Weigel told us that “Providence raised up John Paul II and Benedict XVI… to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation.” “Authoritative” according to whom? According to Mr Weigel himself? By all means. But according to Francis, who has set out to destroy some of their crucial achievements: John Paul’s in the field of sexual ethics, Benedict’s in liturgy, and of both of them on the question of moral relativism? Not by any means, and in this dispute, it is Francis, not Weigel, who counts.
And there is simply no reason why Vatican II should not always be plagued with this problem, pushed aside by acts of papal power, and “interpreted” to mean whatever that power wants it to mean, just as Paul VI did. It is being so plagued at this very moment.
The Third Vatican Council
In his 1999 biography of St John Paul II, Witness to Hope, Weigel writes that
Twenty years after (Vatican II) had closed… (a) ‘progressive’ party in the Church, thinking Vatican II rather old hat, was busy imagining a Vatican III that would complete the rout of traditional Catholicism which it somehow thought to be John XXIII’s intention in summoning the Council.
That party is no longer “busy imagining”; it is busy putting its imaginings into practice. Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and stage manager of the current Pope’s pet project, the Synod on Synodultery, somehow managed to be very frank about the matter during a recent lecture of almost Teilhardian unintelligibility.
The current synodal process is a ‘mature fruit of Vatican II’ and shows how ‘a correct reception of the Council’s ecclesiology is activating such fruitful processes as to open up scenarios that not even the Council had imagined and in which the action of the Spirit that guides the Church is made manifest.’
Earlier today (as I write), a Mass was celebrated to commemorate the beginning of the most recent ecumenical council in the very place where it began 60 years ago. Sitting just a few steps away from St Peter’s tomb, the Holy Father who is always ready with an unkind word for his children once again trotted out his new favorite insult for traditionalists. This is an Italian word of his own devising, “indietristi,” which is as clumsy in the mouth as it is in the mind, but easier to say in English, “backwardists.”
Both progressivism, which lines up behind the world, and traditionalism, or ‘backwardism,’ that longs for a bygone world, are not evidence of love, but of faithlessness.
Wonder no longer if the Listening Church will ever extend its listening to “backwardists.” Wonder instead how many progressives heard that and said to themselves, “Wait, aren’t we in charge now? Didn’t he PUT us in charge?” As another papal biographer, Henry Sire, explained a few years ago, this is the very essence of Peronism, and Peronism is the essence of Francis. You may not be interested in power, but power is extremely interested in you.
But alas, alas for the backwardists, those who are always looking backwards to the 1970s, when the bastions of the Counter-reformation had indeed been razed, and the world flooded into the Church, bringing chaos and destruction with it, and the words of the most recent ecumenical council lay safely buried and undigested in the stomach of its spirit. Alas also for the nostalgic, those who are always looking back to the aughts of this century, when the bastions of John Paul and Benedict had not yet been razed, and it was still possible to imagine, at least sometimes, a Church in which Paul VI did not exist.
[1] I would not, of course, say this on the basis of a single column, or three columns. Omitting mention of Paul VI or downplaying him has been a leitmotif of Mr Weigel’s writings about Vatican II and its reception for some time. We have this assertion that St John XXIII was ideologically hijacked, in which we are told that “it took the Church more than 20 years to grasp the full meaning of Gaudet Mater Ecclesia,” the opening speech which he delivered at Vatican II, without mentioning who was Pope for most of those twenty years, and responsible for obscuring its meaning. (Is it cynical to ask if the Pope should be making speeches that take more than 20 years to understand?) We have this assertion that the Berlin Wall fell because once John Paul II became Pope, Eastern Europeans knew “that ‘Rome’ now had their backs (as it hadn’t in the 1970s),” without mentioning who was Pope during the 1970s, when it didn’t have their backs. (Mr Weigel usually assigns most of blame for the obscene moral failure of Ostpolitik to Paul VI’s Secretary of State, Card. Agostino Casaroli.) We are told that “The War of the Conciliar Succession” has been going on since the ’60s, without being told whose failure to rein in the heresies festering in every corner of the Church made such a war first possible, and then necessary. In his 2019 book The Irony of Modern Catholic History, “Vatican II” is mentioned over 300 times by name, and over 250 times as “the Council”; Paul VI, who promulgated all of its documents, is mentioned just over 80 times; John XXIII, who promulgated none of them, over 100 times, John Paul II nearly 280. In Evangelical Catholicism (2013), “Vatican II” is mentioned over 250 times by name, and 145 times as “the Council”; Paul VI 15 times; John XXIII, only 9 times, John Paul II, over 200. And in this recent podcast about his new book on Vatican II, we learn from Mr Weigel that “a lot of mistakes were made in implementing the Council” (6:40), in the passive-voice-of-unattributed-responsibility. Probably not by anybody in particular…
Gregory DiPippo, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, has studied Latin, Greek, and several other languages, as well as classics and patristics. He has been a regular contributor to the New Liturgical Movementwebsite since 2009, and the editor since 2013. His writings cover a very wide variety of topics, but his first specialty was the study of the reforms of the Roman liturgy before the Second Vatican Council, on which he has written several series of articles.
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In the Gospel stories, Our Lord Jesus Christ always shows particular love and compassion for the children, as He does for the son of the royal official at Capharnaum in today’s Gospel. Our
Lord loves the children in their innocence, and He knows what a tragedy it is for children to lose that innocence by serious sin. He receives them and blesses them, as St. Matthew records:
“Little children were brought to him then that he might lay his hands on them and pray; but the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said to them, ‘Let the little children be, and do not hinder them from coming to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven’” (Mt. 19:13,14).
The Lord has no greater condemnation than for those who lead the innocent into sin:
“And he said to his disciples, ‘It is impossible that scandals should not come; but woe to him through whom they come! It were better for him if a millstone were hung about his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin’” (Lk.17:1,2).
What would He say about our society, which makes it virtually impossible for the young to preserve their innocence? What would He say about those responsible for educating and guiding the children—parents, teachers, pastors—who fail to give proper instruction, and even give bad example, scandal, by their own failure to live up to the standards of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
The Blessed Virgin Mary told us just how difficult it would be in these times. Appearing in 1610 to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres in Ecuador, she said:
“During these unfortunate times evil will invade childhood innocence. In this way,
vocations to the priesthood will be lost, resulting in a true calamity.” She affirmed, “There will be almost no virgin souls left in the world,” and, “How the Church will suffer during this dark night! Lacking a prelate and a father to guide them… many priests will lose their spirit, placing their souls in great danger.”
Are we not seeing it for ourselves? But there would be Catholics who, by the special grace of God, and with the help of the Sacraments and the true Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in a few places, persevering in prayer and avoiding the occasions of sin, would be able to persevere in their holy Faith.
1
But at this present time, Catholics are not clear in their thinking about taking the life of the innocent unborn through the crime of abortion. A well-known Catholic in a position of huge responsibility claimed to be strongly pro-life, EXCEPT in cases of “rape, incest, and the life of the mother.” Are the children conceived under such circumstances any less innocent than the other children? Of course not! It is ALWAYS a grave sin to directly take the life of an innocent person, whether a child in the womb, or at any stage of life.
God protects those who take refuge in Him. He is their place of refuge, their hiding place (Ps. 31:7). The most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary become the home and refuge of those who are wise.
Penance plays an essential role in the Christian life, and it was never more necessary than it is today. The children must be taught to make sacrifices, like the three little children at Fatima, who offered their sacrifices for sinners. If we allow full rein to our appetites and urges, we will
be helpless to avoid sin or to overcome temptation.
The children must be taught the value of self-denial. Just depriving them of what they want without explanation is not enough. And the slight penance “catholics” of these times do on Fridays and Ember Days is not enough to train soldiers of Christ for battle. Think of what soldiers go through in their basic training. They must be toughened up, or they will be useless on the battlefield. The same goes for the spiritual combat. If there is never any self-denial in our lives, we will lose major battles, and the war itself in the end. Think of what is happening to Catholics who have lost the sense of Tradition. They become victims, lambs for the slaughter. This must not happen to us! And it must not happen to the children!
But the poor children these days are getting the absolutely worst example from the world around them. There are grave dangers to their souls in the music, the videos, the TV programs, and on the internet. And, sadly, the classrooms are becoming the absolutely worst environment for the children. We must not abandon them to the wolves. There are things we can yet do if we pray and seek help from Heaven!
Our society is in full revolution against God and His holy Commandments. A fearful judgment awaits us. And we can say that with full conviction, because we know that God will not be mocked for long before He is forced to take terrible vengeance for the sins of the world.
Read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, and you will understand why fire and brimstone rained down from heaven upon them. And you will understand why God will not be long in allowing a similar fate to overtake the world in these evil times.
Be ready! Fight the good fight! Pray your daily Rosary without fail! Turn to prayer with repentant hearts, and do penance for your sins. God will spare those who take refuge in Him. Let us pray in the words of the Introit of the today’s Mass (20th Sunday after Pentecost):
“All that you have done to us, O Lord, You have done in true judgment; because we have sinned against You, and we have not obeyed your commandments; but give glory to Your name, and deal with us according to the multitude of Your mercy (Dan.3:31,29,35).
Happy are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord” (Ps.118:1). †
Twenty years ago, a week before the fortieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, Mr George Weigel, a great admirer of that assembly, wrote an assessment of it for, of all publications, the National Catholic Reporter. The basic thrust of his column is simple: a reading of Vatican II as a power struggle within the Church is incorrect. He does not deny that the Church has collectively “got(ten) Vatican II wrong” in many ways, and did so “by thinking of it chiefly in terms of church politics.” But in “the council’s masterwork,” Lumen Gentium, we see that “(t)he universal call to holiness, not the struggle for ecclesiastical power, was the central motif of Vatican II.” This is both true and a good thing to say, especially in a publication so deeply invested in reading Vatican II and its aftermath as a series of power struggles: of bishops against an overcentralized papacy and curia; of heretical theologians against bishops; and ultimately, of Modern Man™ against the Faith once delivered to the Saints.
Above: Pope Paul VI with one of his greatest critics, Joseph Ratzinger, whom he appoint bishop and then cardinal in 1977 before his death.
When Vatican II Turned Forty
Twenty years ago, a week before the fortieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, Mr George Weigel, a great admirer of that assembly, wrote an assessment of it for, of all publications, the National Catholic Reporter. The basic thrust of his column is simple: a reading of Vatican II as a power struggle within the Church is incorrect. He does not deny that the Church has collectively “got(ten) Vatican II wrong” in many ways, and did so “by thinking of it chiefly in terms of church politics.” But in “the council’s masterwork,” Lumen Gentium, we see that “(t)he universal call to holiness, not the struggle for ecclesiastical power, was the central motif of Vatican II.” This is both true and a good thing to say, especially in a publication so deeply invested in reading Vatican II and its aftermath as a series of power struggles: of bishops against an overcentralized papacy and curia; of heretical theologians against bishops; and ultimately, of Modern Man™ against the Faith once delivered to the Saints.
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But twenty years ago, Mr Weigel was still able to entertain some doubts as to the ultimate fate of Vatican II in the Church’s life, and he goes on to say:
I’ve been much struck recently by the question of whether, in the mid-third millennium, Vatican II will be remembered as another Lateran V or another Trent. Lateran V was a reforming council that failed; Trent was a reforming council whose success defined Catholic life for almost four centuries. Lateran V’s failure was one cause of the fracture of Western Christianity in the Reformation – and thus of the wars of religion, the rise of the modern state, and the gradual erosion of Christian culture in Europe. Getting it wrong, in this business of conciliar reform, can carry high costs.
With all due respect, this question was put incorrectly. By its 40th anniversary, Vatican II was already neither another Lateran V nor another Trent.
Trent began in 1545, which puts its fortieth anniversary in the 1585. By that point, the Church had already made huge strides in implementing the reforms which it had ordered, and the movement to continue doing so was gaining strength every day, with the strong leadership and support of the Papacy. The spread of Protestantism had been checked in much of Europe, and reversed in some places; the evangelization of the New World was proceeding apace. New religious orders such as the Jesuits and Oratorians were thriving and spreading, and inspiring the older ones to highly successful reforms. The model of Counter-Reformation bishops, St Charles Borromeo, was still alive, and a leading figure in the implementation of the Council’s decrees.
It hardly needs saying that forty years out from Vatican II, the Church was not thriving as it was in 1585.
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On the other hand, the fortieth anniversary of Lateran V occurred in 1552… smack in the middle of the Council of Trent. Forty years after Lateran V had failed so spectacularly to bring about any of the reform that the Church so desperately needed (and by so failing, had helped to trigger the Reformation), the Church did not content itself with monomaniacal repetition of the catchphrase, “You have to accept Lateran V!”, while ignoring the fact that everything was burning down around it. Rather, it recognized that its previous feint at reform had failed catastrophically, and set about at Trent to do well what it had done badly at Lateran V.
It hardly needs saying that forty years out from Vatican II, the Church wasn’t doing this either.
The truest parallel with Vatican II to be found among the ecumenical councils is that of Constance (1414-18), the highwater mark of the Conciliarist movement, which taught that the ecumenical council as an institution is superior in authority to the Pope. (i.e., a power-struggle: so ironic…) A wave of enthusiasm for something new, something which everyone hopes will bring great benefit to the Church, is quickly followed by a sudden and almost inexplicable dissipation of that enthusiasm. Just as the bishops who attended Constance did not bother to attend the next council which they themselves had called for, the bishops who wrote (with their periti) and approved the documents of Vatican II seemed afterwards to care little or nothing for what they had written.
Weigel himself acknowledges as much in the same column.
I never seriously read the texts of Vatican II until the mid-1970s, despite eight years in high school and college seminary and two years of graduate studies in theology. I don’t think I was alone in this. [No, he most certainly wasn’t.] In those days, one read about the council … (but) one didn’t wrestle with the texts of the council itself.
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I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why I or anyone else should show an enthusiasm for the texts of Vatican II which their own authors never showed, but Mr Weigel’s enthusiasm for them, at any rate, knows no abatement.
When Vatican II Turned Fifty
Ten years after the aforementioned column, it was time to commemorate the council’s golden anniversary; the venue changed to an incommensurably more Catholic publication, First Things, and so did the tack. In a very brief article, he notes (how could one not?) that “Vatican II is sometimes imagined to be an example of ecclesiastical parthenogenesis: the Council just happened, absent significant antecedents, in a decisive rupture with the past.” But this imagining is incorrect: Popes since Leo XIII, he tells us, had been coming to grips with modernity, and Vatican II was, or was supposed to be, the culmination of this engagement.
However, the future reception of Vatican II is no longer to be understood by looking at any previous council.
[It] was like no other ecumenical Council in history, in that it did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation: the Council Fathers wrote no creed, condemned no heresy, legislated no new canons, defined no dogmas. Thus the decade and a half after the Council ended on December 8, 1965, was a bit of a free-for-all, as varying interpretations of the Council (including appeals to an amorphous ‘spirit of Vatican II’ that seems to have more in common with low-church Protestantism than with Catholicism) contended with each other in what amounted to an ecclesiastical civil war.
Just “a bit of a free-for-all,” he writes, like a British general of a sang particularly froid describing the Second World War. (Fifty years from the opening of Lateran V, by the way, brings us to the opening of the third and final session of Trent; fifty years from the opening of Trent, and Rome is getting ready to celebrate its second Jubilee of the Counter-Reformation.) Why the free-for-all? Because the Council “did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation.” Is it cynical to ask whether this was really a wise procedure for a body whose very raison-d’être is to bring much needed clarity to the Church?
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Never fear. The free-for-all is over, because
Providence raised up two men of genius, John Paul II and Benedict XVI… to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation (and) the truth about the Council. … Vatican II did not displace the Church’s tradition. Vatican II did not create do-it-yourself-Catholicism.
What a relief.
When Vatican II Turned Sixty
Now, another ten years have passed, and any doubts Mr Weigel might once have entertained about the place of Vatican II in the Church’s future life have evaporated as thoroughly as… well, as thoroughly as the enthusiasm of the world’s bishops for Vatican II did after December 8, 1965. In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, he brands it “the most important Catholic event in half a millennium.” From the Council’s own starting date, that brings us back to 1462, fifty years before Lateran V began; from our present year, back to 1522, five years after Lateran V ended and the Protestant Reformation began. Were it not for the previous assurance that Vatican II is like no other council, and historical parallelism thus dismissed, some might find this worrisome.
It is no longer a question of whether Vatican II will be seen in the future as a successful council like Trent or a failed one like Lateran V. The title of the column, published in advance of a book on the subject released one week before the anniversary, is simply “What Vatican II Accomplished.” As in “Mission Accomplished”?
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What a relief.
The sub-header, however, does not briefly summarize these achievements, but like the column itself, brings in the boogeymen, assuring us that “progressives and nostalgic traditionalists” have misunderstood the Council. Vatican II turns out to be as singularly unlucky in its application as socialism, communism, and the other disgusting -isms of the 20th century which it so conspicuously failed to condemn. “If only we had REAL socialism…”
If the job of a sub-header is to summarize a column, John Daniel Davidson of the Federalistwrote this sentence about this column that would have served the purpose far better. “Every positive development in Catholicism since 1965 is because of Vatican II; every distortion or pathology is a misapplication of Vatican II.”
For we are assured by Weigel that
From his historical studies and pastoral experience, John XXIII knew that the defensive Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, however successful a salvage operation, had run its course. It was time to raze the bastions that Catholicism had erected and turn its robust institutions into platforms for evangelization and mission in order to engage a deeply troubled modern world.
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And in brief, despite whatever difficulties the Church may be undergoing right now, or may have been undergoing for the last several decades, this is what the Council has purportedly achieved.
The Pope of the Council
This is one of 19 mentions of Pope John by name, in a column of just under 2100 words, which is an average of about one every 110 words. The unknowing reader might be forgiven for getting the impression that the Council itself was actually his work and faithful to his intentions. But Weigel himself knows this to be untrue, and carefully describes those intentions in the conditional mood:
In his opening address to Vatican II, John XXIII suggested how ecclesiastical renewal would take place. … the Church would develop the means to express ancient and enduring truths in ways that modernity could hear. … his hope that Vatican II would be a ‘new Pentecost.’
By this sleight of hand, the Pope who called Vatican II becomes something like a large, disembodied head, floating above the floor and loudly proclaiming, “I! AM!! JOHN!!! The great and powerful!” Wicked, nostalgic traditionalists, get away from that curtain…
Missing from this and so many other discourses about the reception of the Council and its purported achievements is Paul VI, the Pope in whose reign all of the Council’s documents were promulgated, and who, by his action and inaction over the years that followed it, “implemented” it in ways that thoroughly betrayed those documents, and the intentions of Pope John. Even twenty years ago, when the future reception of Vatican II was still a matter of uncertainty, he merited from Weigel no more than a passing mention in reference to his 1965 visit to the U.N., (an institution which constitutes one of the most conspicuous among Modern Man™’s great and ghastly political failures). By the fiftieth anniversary, he had been thrown down the memory hole. Did the decade and a half which Mr Weigel describes as a “bit of a free-for-all” after the end of Vatican II happen to coincide with anything in particular?
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Get away from that curtain!
Now, at the sixtieth anniversary, in telling us “What Vatican II Accomplished,” Mr Weigel gives us not a hint of who specifically steered it towards its accomplishments. We must not think of Vatican II as an instance of “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis,” but we are left free to think of its documents as products of spontaneous generation, without father, without mother, and without genealogy.
To rehearse these “achievements” in detail would be as unbearably tedious for you to read as it would be for me to write. I will therefore limit myself to commenting on the first which Mr Weigel enumerates, one which happily coincides with my own area of interest and, such as it is, expertise.
He tells us that “After Vatican II, Catholics worshiped in their own languages, rather than in Latin.” But he does not tell us that the general post-Conciliar abandonment of Latin happened in direct contradiction of the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia, which John XXIII promulgated eight months before Vatican II: an “achievement,”in Weigel’s presentation, “without father.”
He does not tell us that the all-vernacular liturgy was brought about in direct contradiction to Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which states that the use of Latin was to be preserved in the liturgy.
“Without mother.”
He does not tell us that when a Sicilian bishop urged the Council Fathers to be cautious about accepting liturgical use of the vernacular, lest a partial permission turn into a Mass with no Latin at all, there was a brief pause, followed by an explosion of laughter, so absurd did the very idea seem to them.
He does not tell us that the Council’s other fifteen documents contain only one brief mention of Latin, precisely because it was taken for granted that Veterum Sapientia had fully dealt with the subject, and there was no need to say any more. Nor indeed could any of them have imagined that any Pope would so cavalierly ignore such an act of his predecessor.
On November 26, 1969, at the last general audience before the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, Paul VI informed the Church that although Latin would no longer be the principal language of the Mass, it would “remain as the means of teaching in ecclesiastical studies and as the key to the patrimony of our religious, historical and human culture. If possible, it will reflourish in splendor.” Mr Weigel does not tell us that that is exactly what John XXIII ordered in Veterum Sapientia, or that none of that happened either.
“Without genealogy.”
As a segue, he tells us that the Council “urg(ed) Catholics to become more biblically literate.” He does not tell us that the Holy See under Paul VI stayed mostly silent as Catholic Biblical scholars introduced all the most fatuous excesses of modern Biblical scholarship into Catholic seminaries and schools, from which they slithered down into sermons and catechism classes. Nor are we told that the revised lectionary of the post-Conciliar Mass routinely censors and violently mispresents the word of God. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum says that “with maternal concern, the Church sees to it that suitable and correct translations are made into different languages,” but we are not told that the official translation used for the Biblical readings at Mass in the United States is the “colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase” known as the New American Bible, nor that it is full of the most gruesome errors.
Sad tales of this sort can and have been told repeatedly about every aspect of the Church’s life over the last 60 years, and they all amount to pretty much the same thing.
The Church lives as it lives now very largely because Paul VI rejected and did not fulfill the will of the Second Vatican Council.
Twenty years ago, Weigel’s rhetorical combination of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi did perhaps serve a legitimate function, not as history or theology, but as propaganda.[1] It encouraged us to believe in one possible understanding of Vatican II, of how it ought to have been implemented, and the prior implementation of it corrected. Whatever the flaws of this understanding may have been, it was certainly better than Paul VI’s. As a priest friend of mine put it to me in mid-2013, “the background radiation (in the Church) was dying down.” St John Paul II and Benedict XVI unquestionably deserve a great deal of the credit for that. Ten years ago, the last full year of Benedict’s reign, it was fully plausible that their far healthier version of Vatican II might prevail, and the worst excesses of the Paul VI years would simply fade into the past and be gently, deservedly forgotten.
Revolution Reborn
But this was before the election of Francis, a man of a very different spirit, who has canonized John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, but revived the ghost of only one of them. The first Pope to never serve as a priest in the Church as it was before the Montinian revolution is committed to that revolution as Papa Montini himself never was. That brings with it a commitment to a violent, revolutionary interpretation of Vatican II, and all that goes with it: the power struggles which Weigel rejected twenty years ago, the “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis” which he rejected ten years ago, and many other interpretations of Vatican II which he deems inauthentic.
I would be utterly remiss were I not to say that Catholics ought to be sincerely grateful to Mr Weigel for speaking out against this as he has in recent times. Despite no evident fondness for the traditional Roman liturgy, he rightly decried the “Liberal Authoritarianism” of Traditionis Custodes, and rightly branded it “theologically incoherent, pastorally divisive, unnecessary, cruel – and a sorry example of the liberal bullying that has become all too familiar in Rome recently.” When the responses to the so-called dubia about TC followed, he pointed out the absurdity of “Undercutting Vatican II to Defend Vatican II” by issuing orders to the bishops wholly contrary to the spirit of Lumen Gentium. He has repeatedly denounced the de facto revival of Paul VI’s Ostpolitik in the Vatican’s current dealings with the single most murderous organization in human history, the Chinese Communist Party. He has called the recent developments in the Pontifical Academy for Life a second assassination attempt against John Paul II.
And this is all to the good.
As important as these matters are, however, they do not lie at the heart of the Vatican II problem.
Ten years ago, Mr Weigel told us that “Providence raised up John Paul II and Benedict XVI… to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation.” “Authoritative” according to whom? According to Mr Weigel himself? By all means. But according to Francis, who has set out to destroy some of their crucial achievements: John Paul’s in the field of sexual ethics, Benedict’s in liturgy, and of both of them on the question of moral relativism? Not by any means, and in this dispute, it is Francis, not Weigel, who counts.
And there is simply no reason why Vatican II should not always be plagued with this problem, pushed aside by acts of papal power, and “interpreted” to mean whatever that power wants it to mean, just as Paul VI did. It is being so plagued at this very moment.
The Third Vatican Council
In his 1999 biography of St John Paul II, Witness to Hope, Weigel writes that
Twenty years after (Vatican II) had closed… (a) ‘progressive’ party in the Church, thinking Vatican II rather old hat, was busy imagining a Vatican III that would complete the rout of traditional Catholicism which it somehow thought to be John XXIII’s intention in summoning the Council.
That party is no longer “busy imagining”; it is busy putting its imaginings into practice. Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and stage manager of the current Pope’s pet project, the Synod on Synodultery, somehow managed to be very frank about the matter during a recent lecture of almost Teilhardian unintelligibility.
The current synodal process is a ‘mature fruit of Vatican II’ and shows how ‘a correct reception of the Council’s ecclesiology is activating such fruitful processes as to open up scenarios that not even the Council had imagined and in which the action of the Spirit that guides the Church is made manifest.’
Earlier today (as I write), a Mass was celebrated to commemorate the beginning of the most recent ecumenical council in the very place where it began 60 years ago. Sitting just a few steps away from St Peter’s tomb, the Holy Father who is always ready with an unkind word for his children once again trotted out his new favorite insult for traditionalists. This is an Italian word of his own devising, “indietristi,” which is as clumsy in the mouth as it is in the mind, but easier to say in English, “backwardists.”
Both progressivism, which lines up behind the world, and traditionalism, or ‘backwardism,’ that longs for a bygone world, are not evidence of love, but of faithlessness.
Wonder no longer if the Listening Church will ever extend its listening to “backwardists.” Wonder instead how many progressives heard that and said to themselves, “Wait, aren’t we in charge now? Didn’t he PUT us in charge?” As another papal biographer, Henry Sire, explained a few years ago, this is the very essence of Peronism, and Peronism is the essence of Francis. You may not be interested in power, but power is extremely interested in you.
But alas, alas for the backwardists, those who are always looking backwards to the 1970s, when the bastions of the Counter-reformation had indeed been razed, and the world flooded into the Church, bringing chaos and destruction with it, and the words of the most recent ecumenical council lay safely buried and undigested in the stomach of its spirit. Alas also for the nostalgic, those who are always looking back to the aughts of this century, when the bastions of John Paul and Benedict had not yet been razed, and it was still possible to imagine, at least sometimes, a Church in which Paul VI did not exist.
[1] I would not, of course, say this on the basis of a single column, or three columns. Omitting mention of Paul VI or downplaying him has been a leitmotif of Mr Weigel’s writings about Vatican II and its reception for some time. We have this assertion that St John XXIII was ideologically hijacked, in which we are told that “it took the Church more than 20 years to grasp the full meaning of Gaudet Mater Ecclesia,” the opening speech which he delivered at Vatican II, without mentioning who was Pope for most of those twenty years, and responsible for obscuring its meaning. (Is it cynical to ask if the Pope should be making speeches that take more than 20 years to understand?) We have this assertion that the Berlin Wall fell because once John Paul II became Pope, Eastern Europeans knew “that ‘Rome’ now had their backs (as it hadn’t in the 1970s),” without mentioning who was Pope during the 1970s, when it didn’t have their backs. (Mr Weigel usually assigns most of blame for the obscene moral failure of Ostpolitik to Paul VI’s Secretary of State, Card. Agostino Casaroli.) We are told that “The War of the Conciliar Succession” has been going on since the ’60s, without being told whose failure to rein in the heresies festering in every corner of the Church made such a war first possible, and then necessary. In his 2019 book The Irony of Modern Catholic History, “Vatican II” is mentioned over 300 times by name, and over 250 times as “the Council”; Paul VI, who promulgated all of its documents, is mentioned just over 80 times; John XXIII, who promulgated none of them, over 100 times, John Paul II nearly 280. In Evangelical Catholicism (2013), “Vatican II” is mentioned over 250 times by name, and 145 times as “the Council”; Paul VI 15 times; John XXIII, only 9 times, John Paul II, over 200. And in this recent podcast about his new book on Vatican II, we learn from Mr Weigel that “a lot of mistakes were made in implementing the Council” (6:40), in the passive-voice-of-unattributed-responsibility. Probably not by anybody in particular…
Gregory DiPippo, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, has studied Latin, Greek, and several other languages, as well as classics and patristics. He has been a regular contributor to the New Liturgical Movementwebsite since 2009, and the editor since 2013. His writings cover a very wide variety of topics, but his first specialty was the study of the reforms of the Roman liturgy before the Second Vatican Council, on which he has written several series of articles.
Above: Pope Paul VI with one of his greatest critics, Joseph Ratzinger, whom he appoint bishop and then cardinal in 1977 before his death.
When Vatican II Turned Forty
Twenty years ago, a week before the fortieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, Mr George Weigel, a great admirer of that assembly, wrote an assessment of it for, of all publications, the National Catholic Reporter. The basic thrust of his column is simple: a reading of Vatican II as a power struggle within the Church is incorrect. He does not deny that the Church has collectively “got(ten) Vatican II wrong” in many ways, and did so “by thinking of it chiefly in terms of church politics.” But in “the council’s masterwork,” Lumen Gentium, we see that “(t)he universal call to holiness, not the struggle for ecclesiastical power, was the central motif of Vatican II.” This is both true and a good thing to say, especially in a publication so deeply invested in reading Vatican II and its aftermath as a series of power struggles: of bishops against an overcentralized papacy and curia; of heretical theologians against bishops; and ultimately, of Modern Man™ against the Faith once delivered to the Saints.
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But twenty years ago, Mr Weigel was still able to entertain some doubts as to the ultimate fate of Vatican II in the Church’s life, and he goes on to say:
I’ve been much struck recently by the question of whether, in the mid-third millennium, Vatican II will be remembered as another Lateran V or another Trent. Lateran V was a reforming council that failed; Trent was a reforming council whose success defined Catholic life for almost four centuries. Lateran V’s failure was one cause of the fracture of Western Christianity in the Reformation – and thus of the wars of religion, the rise of the modern state, and the gradual erosion of Christian culture in Europe. Getting it wrong, in this business of conciliar reform, can carry high costs.
With all due respect, this question was put incorrectly. By its 40th anniversary, Vatican II was already neither another Lateran V nor another Trent.
Trent began in 1545, which puts its fortieth anniversary in the 1585. By that point, the Church had already made huge strides in implementing the reforms which it had ordered, and the movement to continue doing so was gaining strength every day, with the strong leadership and support of the Papacy. The spread of Protestantism had been checked in much of Europe, and reversed in some places; the evangelization of the New World was proceeding apace. New religious orders such as the Jesuits and Oratorians were thriving and spreading, and inspiring the older ones to highly successful reforms. The model of Counter-Reformation bishops, St Charles Borromeo, was still alive, and a leading figure in the implementation of the Council’s decrees.
It hardly needs saying that forty years out from Vatican II, the Church was not thriving as it was in 1585.
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On the other hand, the fortieth anniversary of Lateran V occurred in 1552… smack in the middle of the Council of Trent. Forty years after Lateran V had failed so spectacularly to bring about any of the reform that the Church so desperately needed (and by so failing, had helped to trigger the Reformation), the Church did not content itself with monomaniacal repetition of the catchphrase, “You have to accept Lateran V!”, while ignoring the fact that everything was burning down around it. Rather, it recognized that its previous feint at reform had failed catastrophically, and set about at Trent to do well what it had done badly at Lateran V.
It hardly needs saying that forty years out from Vatican II, the Church wasn’t doing this either.
The truest parallel with Vatican II to be found among the ecumenical councils is that of Constance (1414-18), the highwater mark of the Conciliarist movement, which taught that the ecumenical council as an institution is superior in authority to the Pope. (i.e., a power-struggle: so ironic…) A wave of enthusiasm for something new, something which everyone hopes will bring great benefit to the Church, is quickly followed by a sudden and almost inexplicable dissipation of that enthusiasm. Just as the bishops who attended Constance did not bother to attend the next council which they themselves had called for, the bishops who wrote (with their periti) and approved the documents of Vatican II seemed afterwards to care little or nothing for what they had written.
Weigel himself acknowledges as much in the same column.
I never seriously read the texts of Vatican II until the mid-1970s, despite eight years in high school and college seminary and two years of graduate studies in theology. I don’t think I was alone in this. [No, he most certainly wasn’t.] In those days, one read about the council … (but) one didn’t wrestle with the texts of the council itself.
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I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why I or anyone else should show an enthusiasm for the texts of Vatican II which their own authors never showed, but Mr Weigel’s enthusiasm for them, at any rate, knows no abatement.
When Vatican II Turned Fifty
Ten years after the aforementioned column, it was time to commemorate the council’s golden anniversary; the venue changed to an incommensurably more Catholic publication, First Things, and so did the tack. In a very brief article, he notes (how could one not?) that “Vatican II is sometimes imagined to be an example of ecclesiastical parthenogenesis: the Council just happened, absent significant antecedents, in a decisive rupture with the past.” But this imagining is incorrect: Popes since Leo XIII, he tells us, had been coming to grips with modernity, and Vatican II was, or was supposed to be, the culmination of this engagement.
However, the future reception of Vatican II is no longer to be understood by looking at any previous council.
[It] was like no other ecumenical Council in history, in that it did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation: the Council Fathers wrote no creed, condemned no heresy, legislated no new canons, defined no dogmas. Thus the decade and a half after the Council ended on December 8, 1965, was a bit of a free-for-all, as varying interpretations of the Council (including appeals to an amorphous ‘spirit of Vatican II’ that seems to have more in common with low-church Protestantism than with Catholicism) contended with each other in what amounted to an ecclesiastical civil war.
Just “a bit of a free-for-all,” he writes, like a British general of a sang particularly froid describing the Second World War. (Fifty years from the opening of Lateran V, by the way, brings us to the opening of the third and final session of Trent; fifty years from the opening of Trent, and Rome is getting ready to celebrate its second Jubilee of the Counter-Reformation.) Why the free-for-all? Because the Council “did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation.” Is it cynical to ask whether this was really a wise procedure for a body whose very raison-d’être is to bring much needed clarity to the Church?
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Never fear. The free-for-all is over, because
Providence raised up two men of genius, John Paul II and Benedict XVI… to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation (and) the truth about the Council. … Vatican II did not displace the Church’s tradition. Vatican II did not create do-it-yourself-Catholicism.
What a relief.
When Vatican II Turned Sixty
Now, another ten years have passed, and any doubts Mr Weigel might once have entertained about the place of Vatican II in the Church’s future life have evaporated as thoroughly as… well, as thoroughly as the enthusiasm of the world’s bishops for Vatican II did after December 8, 1965. In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, he brands it “the most important Catholic event in half a millennium.” From the Council’s own starting date, that brings us back to 1462, fifty years before Lateran V began; from our present year, back to 1522, five years after Lateran V ended and the Protestant Reformation began. Were it not for the previous assurance that Vatican II is like no other council, and historical parallelism thus dismissed, some might find this worrisome.
It is no longer a question of whether Vatican II will be seen in the future as a successful council like Trent or a failed one like Lateran V. The title of the column, published in advance of a book on the subject released one week before the anniversary, is simply “What Vatican II Accomplished.” As in “Mission Accomplished”?
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What a relief.
The sub-header, however, does not briefly summarize these achievements, but like the column itself, brings in the boogeymen, assuring us that “progressives and nostalgic traditionalists” have misunderstood the Council. Vatican II turns out to be as singularly unlucky in its application as socialism, communism, and the other disgusting -isms of the 20th century which it so conspicuously failed to condemn. “If only we had REAL socialism…”
If the job of a sub-header is to summarize a column, John Daniel Davidson of the Federalistwrote this sentence about this column that would have served the purpose far better. “Every positive development in Catholicism since 1965 is because of Vatican II; every distortion or pathology is a misapplication of Vatican II.”
For we are assured by Weigel that
From his historical studies and pastoral experience, John XXIII knew that the defensive Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, however successful a salvage operation, had run its course. It was time to raze the bastions that Catholicism had erected and turn its robust institutions into platforms for evangelization and mission in order to engage a deeply troubled modern world.
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And in brief, despite whatever difficulties the Church may be undergoing right now, or may have been undergoing for the last several decades, this is what the Council has purportedly achieved.
The Pope of the Council
This is one of 19 mentions of Pope John by name, in a column of just under 2100 words, which is an average of about one every 110 words. The unknowing reader might be forgiven for getting the impression that the Council itself was actually his work and faithful to his intentions. But Weigel himself knows this to be untrue, and carefully describes those intentions in the conditional mood:
In his opening address to Vatican II, John XXIII suggested how ecclesiastical renewal would take place. … the Church would develop the means to express ancient and enduring truths in ways that modernity could hear. … his hope that Vatican II would be a ‘new Pentecost.’
By this sleight of hand, the Pope who called Vatican II becomes something like a large, disembodied head, floating above the floor and loudly proclaiming, “I! AM!! JOHN!!! The great and powerful!” Wicked, nostalgic traditionalists, get away from that curtain…
Missing from this and so many other discourses about the reception of the Council and its purported achievements is Paul VI, the Pope in whose reign all of the Council’s documents were promulgated, and who, by his action and inaction over the years that followed it, “implemented” it in ways that thoroughly betrayed those documents, and the intentions of Pope John. Even twenty years ago, when the future reception of Vatican II was still a matter of uncertainty, he merited from Weigel no more than a passing mention in reference to his 1965 visit to the U.N., (an institution which constitutes one of the most conspicuous among Modern Man™’s great and ghastly political failures). By the fiftieth anniversary, he had been thrown down the memory hole. Did the decade and a half which Mr Weigel describes as a “bit of a free-for-all” after the end of Vatican II happen to coincide with anything in particular?
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Get away from that curtain!
Now, at the sixtieth anniversary, in telling us “What Vatican II Accomplished,” Mr Weigel gives us not a hint of who specifically steered it towards its accomplishments. We must not think of Vatican II as an instance of “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis,” but we are left free to think of its documents as products of spontaneous generation, without father, without mother, and without genealogy.
To rehearse these “achievements” in detail would be as unbearably tedious for you to read as it would be for me to write. I will therefore limit myself to commenting on the first which Mr Weigel enumerates, one which happily coincides with my own area of interest and, such as it is, expertise.
He tells us that “After Vatican II, Catholics worshiped in their own languages, rather than in Latin.” But he does not tell us that the general post-Conciliar abandonment of Latin happened in direct contradiction of the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia, which John XXIII promulgated eight months before Vatican II: an “achievement,”in Weigel’s presentation, “without father.”
He does not tell us that the all-vernacular liturgy was brought about in direct contradiction to Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which states that the use of Latin was to be preserved in the liturgy.
“Without mother.”
He does not tell us that when a Sicilian bishop urged the Council Fathers to be cautious about accepting liturgical use of the vernacular, lest a partial permission turn into a Mass with no Latin at all, there was a brief pause, followed by an explosion of laughter, so absurd did the very idea seem to them.
He does not tell us that the Council’s other fifteen documents contain only one brief mention of Latin, precisely because it was taken for granted that Veterum Sapientia had fully dealt with the subject, and there was no need to say any more. Nor indeed could any of them have imagined that any Pope would so cavalierly ignore such an act of his predecessor.
On November 26, 1969, at the last general audience before the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, Paul VI informed the Church that although Latin would no longer be the principal language of the Mass, it would “remain as the means of teaching in ecclesiastical studies and as the key to the patrimony of our religious, historical and human culture. If possible, it will reflourish in splendor.” Mr Weigel does not tell us that that is exactly what John XXIII ordered in Veterum Sapientia, or that none of that happened either.
“Without genealogy.”
As a segue, he tells us that the Council “urg(ed) Catholics to become more biblically literate.” He does not tell us that the Holy See under Paul VI stayed mostly silent as Catholic Biblical scholars introduced all the most fatuous excesses of modern Biblical scholarship into Catholic seminaries and schools, from which they slithered down into sermons and catechism classes. Nor are we told that the revised lectionary of the post-Conciliar Mass routinely censors and violently mispresents the word of God. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum says that “with maternal concern, the Church sees to it that suitable and correct translations are made into different languages,” but we are not told that the official translation used for the Biblical readings at Mass in the United States is the “colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase” known as the New American Bible, nor that it is full of the most gruesome errors.
Sad tales of this sort can and have been told repeatedly about every aspect of the Church’s life over the last 60 years, and they all amount to pretty much the same thing.
The Church lives as it lives now very largely because Paul VI rejected and did not fulfill the will of the Second Vatican Council.
Twenty years ago, Weigel’s rhetorical combination of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi did perhaps serve a legitimate function, not as history or theology, but as propaganda.[1] It encouraged us to believe in one possible understanding of Vatican II, of how it ought to have been implemented, and the prior implementation of it corrected. Whatever the flaws of this understanding may have been, it was certainly better than Paul VI’s. As a priest friend of mine put it to me in mid-2013, “the background radiation (in the Church) was dying down.” St John Paul II and Benedict XVI unquestionably deserve a great deal of the credit for that. Ten years ago, the last full year of Benedict’s reign, it was fully plausible that their far healthier version of Vatican II might prevail, and the worst excesses of the Paul VI years would simply fade into the past and be gently, deservedly forgotten.
Revolution Reborn
But this was before the election of Francis, a man of a very different spirit, who has canonized John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, but revived the ghost of only one of them. The first Pope to never serve as a priest in the Church as it was before the Montinian revolution is committed to that revolution as Papa Montini himself never was. That brings with it a commitment to a violent, revolutionary interpretation of Vatican II, and all that goes with it: the power struggles which Weigel rejected twenty years ago, the “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis” which he rejected ten years ago, and many other interpretations of Vatican II which he deems inauthentic.
I would be utterly remiss were I not to say that Catholics ought to be sincerely grateful to Mr Weigel for speaking out against this as he has in recent times. Despite no evident fondness for the traditional Roman liturgy, he rightly decried the “Liberal Authoritarianism” of Traditionis Custodes, and rightly branded it “theologically incoherent, pastorally divisive, unnecessary, cruel – and a sorry example of the liberal bullying that has become all too familiar in Rome recently.” When the responses to the so-called dubia about TC followed, he pointed out the absurdity of “Undercutting Vatican II to Defend Vatican II” by issuing orders to the bishops wholly contrary to the spirit of Lumen Gentium. He has repeatedly denounced the de facto revival of Paul VI’s Ostpolitik in the Vatican’s current dealings with the single most murderous organization in human history, the Chinese Communist Party. He has called the recent developments in the Pontifical Academy for Life a second assassination attempt against John Paul II.
And this is all to the good.
As important as these matters are, however, they do not lie at the heart of the Vatican II problem.
Ten years ago, Mr Weigel told us that “Providence raised up John Paul II and Benedict XVI… to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation.” “Authoritative” according to whom? According to Mr Weigel himself? By all means. But according to Francis, who has set out to destroy some of their crucial achievements: John Paul’s in the field of sexual ethics, Benedict’s in liturgy, and of both of them on the question of moral relativism? Not by any means, and in this dispute, it is Francis, not Weigel, who counts.
And there is simply no reason why Vatican II should not always be plagued with this problem, pushed aside by acts of papal power, and “interpreted” to mean whatever that power wants it to mean, just as Paul VI did. It is being so plagued at this very moment.
The Third Vatican Council
In his 1999 biography of St John Paul II, Witness to Hope, Weigel writes that
Twenty years after (Vatican II) had closed… (a) ‘progressive’ party in the Church, thinking Vatican II rather old hat, was busy imagining a Vatican III that would complete the rout of traditional Catholicism which it somehow thought to be John XXIII’s intention in summoning the Council.
That party is no longer “busy imagining”; it is busy putting its imaginings into practice. Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and stage manager of the current Pope’s pet project, the Synod on Synodultery, somehow managed to be very frank about the matter during a recent lecture of almost Teilhardian unintelligibility.
The current synodal process is a ‘mature fruit of Vatican II’ and shows how ‘a correct reception of the Council’s ecclesiology is activating such fruitful processes as to open up scenarios that not even the Council had imagined and in which the action of the Spirit that guides the Church is made manifest.’
Earlier today (as I write), a Mass was celebrated to commemorate the beginning of the most recent ecumenical council in the very place where it began 60 years ago. Sitting just a few steps away from St Peter’s tomb, the Holy Father who is always ready with an unkind word for his children once again trotted out his new favorite insult for traditionalists. This is an Italian word of his own devising, “indietristi,” which is as clumsy in the mouth as it is in the mind, but easier to say in English, “backwardists.”
Both progressivism, which lines up behind the world, and traditionalism, or ‘backwardism,’ that longs for a bygone world, are not evidence of love, but of faithlessness.
Wonder no longer if the Listening Church will ever extend its listening to “backwardists.” Wonder instead how many progressives heard that and said to themselves, “Wait, aren’t we in charge now? Didn’t he PUT us in charge?” As another papal biographer, Henry Sire, explained a few years ago, this is the very essence of Peronism, and Peronism is the essence of Francis. You may not be interested in power, but power is extremely interested in you.
But alas, alas for the backwardists, those who are always looking backwards to the 1970s, when the bastions of the Counter-reformation had indeed been razed, and the world flooded into the Church, bringing chaos and destruction with it, and the words of the most recent ecumenical council lay safely buried and undigested in the stomach of its spirit. Alas also for the nostalgic, those who are always looking back to the aughts of this century, when the bastions of John Paul and Benedict had not yet been razed, and it was still possible to imagine, at least sometimes, a Church in which Paul VI did not exist.
[1] I would not, of course, say this on the basis of a single column, or three columns. Omitting mention of Paul VI or downplaying him has been a leitmotif of Mr Weigel’s writings about Vatican II and its reception for some time. We have this assertion that St John XXIII was ideologically hijacked, in which we are told that “it took the Church more than 20 years to grasp the full meaning of Gaudet Mater Ecclesia,” the opening speech which he delivered at Vatican II, without mentioning who was Pope for most of those twenty years, and responsible for obscuring its meaning. (Is it cynical to ask if the Pope should be making speeches that take more than 20 years to understand?) We have this assertion that the Berlin Wall fell because once John Paul II became Pope, Eastern Europeans knew “that ‘Rome’ now had their backs (as it hadn’t in the 1970s),” without mentioning who was Pope during the 1970s, when it didn’t have their backs. (Mr Weigel usually assigns most of blame for the obscene moral failure of Ostpolitik to Paul VI’s Secretary of State, Card. Agostino Casaroli.) We are told that “The War of the Conciliar Succession” has been going on since the ’60s, without being told whose failure to rein in the heresies festering in every corner of the Church made such a war first possible, and then necessary. In his 2019 book The Irony of Modern Catholic History, “Vatican II” is mentioned over 300 times by name, and over 250 times as “the Council”; Paul VI, who promulgated all of its documents, is mentioned just over 80 times; John XXIII, who promulgated none of them, over 100 times, John Paul II nearly 280. In Evangelical Catholicism (2013), “Vatican II” is mentioned over 250 times by name, and 145 times as “the Council”; Paul VI 15 times; John XXIII, only 9 times, John Paul II, over 200. And in this recent podcast about his new book on Vatican II, we learn from Mr Weigel that “a lot of mistakes were made in implementing the Council” (6:40), in the passive-voice-of-unattributed-responsibility. Probably not by anybody in particular…
Gregory DiPippo, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, has studied Latin, Greek, and several other languages, as well as classics and patristics. He has been a regular contributor to the New Liturgical Movementwebsite since 2009, and the editor since 2013. His writings cover a very wide variety of topics, but his first specialty was the study of the reforms of the Roman liturgy before the Second Vatican Council, on which he has written several series of articles.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Twenty years ago, a week before the fortieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, Mr George Weigel, a great admirer of that assembly, wrote an assessment of it for, of all publications, the National Catholic Reporter. The basic thrust of his column is simple: a reading of Vatican II as a power struggle within the Church is incorrect. He does not deny that the Church has collectively “got(ten) Vatican II wrong” in many ways, and did so “by thinking of it chiefly in terms of church politics.” But in “the council’s masterwork,” Lumen Gentium, we see that “(t)he universal call to holiness, not the struggle for ecclesiastical power, was the central motif of Vatican II.” This is both true and a good thing to say, especially in a publication so deeply invested in reading Vatican II and its aftermath as a series of power struggles: of bishops against an overcentralized papacy and curia; of heretical theologians against bishops; and ultimately, of Modern Man™ against the Faith once delivered to the Saints.
Newsweek recently published an op-ed from our president, Lila Rose, on the post-abortion regret and trauma that so many women experience. You can read the article here: https://www.newsweek.com/lasting-trauma-abortion-opinion-1753331 The abortion industry wants us to believe that choosing death is empowering for women, yet it is quite the opposite. There are millions of women — and men — who experience lasting pain and trauma after abortion. They grieve the loss of their children killed by abortion, often silently. What is often lost in the abortion debate is that behind abortion is a child who is brutally killed and a mother and father who are deeply wounded. The research shows that women who choose that fate for their children often deeply regret their decisions, and feel physical and emotional consequences for years afterward. Rather than shouting their abortions, many women stay silent, enduring their fear and grief alone. It is far past time for men and women to speak up and end the silence around the long-term effects of abortion. Only then can we begin to heal as a society. We will continue to amplify their voices and demand better for our men, our women, and our children. For Life, Josef LippChief Operating Officer
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on What is often lost in the abortion debate is that behind abortion is a child who is brutally killed and a mother and father who are deeply wounded.
As we already know, things aren’t looking too good for the Democrats, who are expected to take a shellacking in about two weeks during the midterm elections.
While Republicans are wisely hammering them on crime, education, immigration, and the economy, the left has been flailing. One of the Democrats’ most pressing problems is their apparent inability to come up with a viable messaging strategy.
This has been an enormous struggle for Democratic politicians and their comrades in the activist media. They have few accomplishments to tout, having turned in an abysmal performance when they took control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2021.
Politico recently published an interview with Stan Greenberg, a well-known Democratic pollster, who discusses the Democrats’ messaging challenges. His suggestion is that the left stop bragging about their supposed accomplishment and pivot to what it will do if allowed to retain control of the legislature.
“It’s our worst performing message,” Greenberg says. “I’ve tested it. I did Biden’s exact words, his exact speech. And that’s the test where we lost all of our leads… It said to the voters that this election is about my accomplishments as a leader and not about the challenges you’re experiencing.”
Greenberg is a veteran of the polling industry, having served as President Bill Clinton’s pollster. “He famously delivered a scorcher of a post-mortem that laid blame at the feet of BARACK OBAMA and his White House for midterm losses in 2010,” according to Politico.
“I’m stunned about how much of the Democratic commentary is winging it,” Greenberg continues. “[Republicans are] hitting us on crime and border and inflation…. That has huge power. And we have the self-satisfied message of how much we’ve accomplished rather than being focused on what is happening to people.”
The interviewer asks if President Joe Biden was using the right messaging strategy. His answer: “Nope.”
“I saw their visuals when they were campaigning with the West in which they were talking about helping families with high costs,” Greenberg recounts. “So they’ve made a turn with addressing it but they’re also combining it with a message of how great a job they’re doing.”
The pollster advises Democrats to focus less on the legislation they passed and more on how it will help everyday Americans in the future. He suggests touting student debt relief and prescription drug price reforms, “in the context of how it is helping them with the cost of living, not as a means of boasting about your accomplishments.”
Greenberg also recommends focusing on bringing back the expanded child tax credit. “The policy, which provided $3,000 to $3,600 per child for families that made $150,000 per couple or $112,500 per single parent unit, had been a major component of Biden’s Covid-relief package. But it lapsed and talks to renew it have completely stalled,” the report noted.
“They’re elites and live in a world of college educated voters who didn’t have it as a lifeline. They think our own base responds to identity politics rather than economics,” the pollster says. “If your goal is to win an economic argument, go on ‘Morning Joe.’ If the goal is to win an election, look at the f*cking data.”
Of course, Greenberg is not wrong. With my background in sales, I know how important it is to focus less on the features of a product (legislation) and persuade by emphasizing the benefit of what you’re selling (lower cost of living).
But there are some problems here.
For starters, it is far too late for Democrats to rehabilitate their messaging strategy. Even if they were to start taking Greenberg’s advice tomorrow, they would not be able to change enough minds to avoid their impending losses. The die is pretty much cast at this point – most already know who they are voting for when they step into the booth on November 8.
Additionally, the Democrats’ policies have not created the benefit Greenberg suggests. The cost of living has not decreased despite the passage of student debt relief and dealing with prescription drug prices. People are still paying exorbitant amounts when they go to the grocery store or to fill up their gas tanks. Many are still dealing with surging crime rates that Democrats seem unable to address. Progressives insist on inculcating young children with their radical ideas on race, sexuality, and gender identity in K-12 schools. The migrant crisis is still in full swing as the Biden administration continues lying to the public about the problem.
The reality is that Democrats don’t have much to sell to the average American voter. It is why their strategy has been to demonize “MAGA extremists” and continue harping on Jan. 6. At this point, their political fate is sealed for the near future.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on HIGH FLYING BIDEN SHOULD BE GROUNDED
As we already know, things aren’t looking too good for the Democrats, who are expected to take a shellacking in about two weeks during the midterm elections.
While Republicans are wisely hammering them on crime, education, immigration, and the economy, the left has been flailing. One of the Democrats’ most pressing problems is their apparent inability to come up with a viable messaging strategy.
This has been an enormous struggle for Democratic politicians and their comrades in the activist media. They have few accomplishments to tout, having turned in an abysmal performance when they took control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2021.
Politico recently published an interview with Stan Greenberg, a well-known Democratic pollster, who discusses the Democrats’ messaging challenges. His suggestion is that the left stop bragging about their supposed accomplishment and pivot to what it will do if allowed to retain control of the legislature.
“It’s our worst performing message,” Greenberg says. “I’ve tested it. I did Biden’s exact words, his exact speech. And that’s the test where we lost all of our leads… It said to the voters that this election is about my accomplishments as a leader and not about the challenges you’re experiencing.”
Greenberg is a veteran of the polling industry, having served as President Bill Clinton’s pollster. “He famously delivered a scorcher of a post-mortem that laid blame at the feet of BARACK OBAMA and his White House for midterm losses in 2010,” according to Politico.
“I’m stunned about how much of the Democratic commentary is winging it,” Greenberg continues. “[Republicans are] hitting us on crime and border and inflation…. That has huge power. And we have the self-satisfied message of how much we’ve accomplished rather than being focused on what is happening to people.”
The interviewer asks if President Joe Biden was using the right messaging strategy. His answer: “Nope.”
“I saw their visuals when they were campaigning with the West in which they were talking about helping families with high costs,” Greenberg recounts. “So they’ve made a turn with addressing it but they’re also combining it with a message of how great a job they’re doing.”
The pollster advises Democrats to focus less on the legislation they passed and more on how it will help everyday Americans in the future. He suggests touting student debt relief and prescription drug price reforms, “in the context of how it is helping them with the cost of living, not as a means of boasting about your accomplishments.”
Greenberg also recommends focusing on bringing back the expanded child tax credit. “The policy, which provided $3,000 to $3,600 per child for families that made $150,000 per couple or $112,500 per single parent unit, had been a major component of Biden’s Covid-relief package. But it lapsed and talks to renew it have completely stalled,” the report noted.
“They’re elites and live in a world of college educated voters who didn’t have it as a lifeline. They think our own base responds to identity politics rather than economics,” the pollster says. “If your goal is to win an economic argument, go on ‘Morning Joe.’ If the goal is to win an election, look at the f*cking data.”
Of course, Greenberg is not wrong. With my background in sales, I know how important it is to focus less on the features of a product (legislation) and persuade by emphasizing the benefit of what you’re selling (lower cost of living).
But there are some problems here.
For starters, it is far too late for Democrats to rehabilitate their messaging strategy. Even if they were to start taking Greenberg’s advice tomorrow, they would not be able to change enough minds to avoid their impending losses. The die is pretty much cast at this point – most already know who they are voting for when they step into the booth on November 8.
Additionally, the Democrats’ policies have not created the benefit Greenberg suggests. The cost of living has not decreased despite the passage of student debt relief and dealing with prescription drug prices. People are still paying exorbitant amounts when they go to the grocery store or to fill up their gas tanks. Many are still dealing with surging crime rates that Democrats seem unable to address. Progressives insist on inculcating young children with their radical ideas on race, sexuality, and gender identity in K-12 schools. The migrant crisis is still in full swing as the Biden administration continues lying to the public about the problem.
The reality is that Democrats don’t have much to sell to the average American voter. It is why their strategy has been to demonize “MAGA extremists” and continue harping on Jan. 6. At this point, their political fate is sealed for the near future.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on SEEING IS BELIEVING!!!!!!
Normally, when I write pieces on Joe Biden’s brain going on the fritz, I’m heavy on the snark and jokes about the White House not getting his drug cocktail right. But a newly released MSNBC interview with the president took things to a place where that doesn’t seem appropriate.
In the first clip, Biden appeared to have a physical issue when asked about running in 2024. You have to watch the clip to get the full effect, but the president not only goes silent, but his eyes droop down and he looks like he’s about to fall over for a second. It was so bad that the interviewer reacts in a startled fashion, obviously believing Biden was going to pass out.
It’s also worth noting that there’s an editor’s cut in that part of the interview. Was he actually out of it for even longer than the clip shows?
Eventually, after the interviewer seemed to jolt Biden back into consciousness, the president stumbled through his answer. His pacing was noticeably very lethargic while doing so, and his struggles continued in other parts of the interview.
I’m not sure exactly when this interview was filmed, but it either came right before or right after another incident where Biden spoke unintelligibly to a reporter in Pennsylvania without even realizing it. Something is definitely going on with him, and those in the media refusing to deal with the issue are now complicit in covering up what appears to be a serious issue with the president’s health.
This is really concerning stuff, and no amount of deflecting to Trump holding a glass of water with two hands will change that. What’s in that video should pique the interest of any fair-minded individual about Biden’s condition. The presidency is not a job for someone that should be in a retirement home, and even though we’ve all had our fun in the past, we’ve reached the point where this isn’t funny anymore.
There is no way Biden is actually functioning as the president. What kind of drugs is he taking? What is he doing when he runs off to Delaware every weekend (he’s currently there again)? Why do his energy levels appear to vary so wildly? These are questions that demand answers, and it’s high time the press corps put aside its partisanship and did its job. This is too important to keep sweeping under the rug.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on EVIDENCE OF BIDEN’S MENTAL DISABILITY
Normally, when I write pieces on Joe Biden’s brain going on the fritz, I’m heavy on the snark and jokes about the White House not getting his drug cocktail right. But a newly released MSNBC interview with the president took things to a place where that doesn’t seem appropriate.
In the first clip, Biden appeared to have a physical issue when asked about running in 2024. You have to watch the clip to get the full effect, but the president not only goes silent, but his eyes droop down and he looks like he’s about to fall over for a second. It was so bad that the interviewer reacts in a startled fashion, obviously believing Biden was going to pass out.
It’s also worth noting that there’s an editor’s cut in that part of the interview. Was he actually out of it for even longer than the clip shows?
Eventually, after the interviewer seemed to jolt Biden back into consciousness, the president stumbled through his answer. His pacing was noticeably very lethargic while doing so, and his struggles continued in other parts of the interview.
I’m not sure exactly when this interview was filmed, but it either came right before or right after another incident where Biden spoke unintelligibly to a reporter in Pennsylvania without even realizing it. Something is definitely going on with him, and those in the media refusing to deal with the issue are now complicit in covering up what appears to be a serious issue with the president’s health.
This is really concerning stuff, and no amount of deflecting to Trump holding a glass of water with two hands will change that. What’s in that video should pique the interest of any fair-minded individual about Biden’s condition. The presidency is not a job for someone that should be in a retirement home, and even though we’ve all had our fun in the past, we’ve reached the point where this isn’t funny anymore.
There is no way Biden is actually functioning as the president. What kind of drugs is he taking? What is he doing when he runs off to Delaware every weekend (he’s currently there again)? Why do his energy levels appear to vary so wildly? These are questions that demand answers, and it’s high time the press corps put aside its partisanship and did its job. This is too important to keep sweeping under the rug.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on WATCH THIS VIDEO AND IT SHOULD REMOVE ANY DOUBTS YOU HAVE ABOUT BIDEN’S INCOMPETENCY TO BE PRESIDENT
There is nothing “unprecedented” about challenging election results. And for Democrats, there’s nothing unprecedented in trying to manipulate them.
By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
October 19, 2022
A Democratic myth has arisen that Donald Trump’s denial of the accuracy of the 2020 vote was “unprecedented.”
Unfortunately, the history of U.S. elections is often a story of both legitimate and illegitimate election denialism.
The 1800, 1824, 1876, and 1960 elections were all understandably questioned. In some of these cases, a partisan House of Representatives decided the winner.
Presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000 did not accept the popular vote results in Florida. He spent five weeks futilely contesting the state’s tally—until recounts and the Supreme Court certified it.
The ensuing charge that George W. Bush was “selected not elected” was the Democrats’ denialist mantra for years.
In 2004, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and 31 Democratic House members voted not to certify the Ohio election results in their unhinged efforts to overturn the election. Those denialists included the current sanctimonious chairman of the January 6 select committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson (D-Miss).
After 2016, crackpot Democratic orthodoxy for years insisted that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to “steal”certain victory from Hillary Clinton.
Clinton herself claimed that Trump was not a “legitimate”president. No wonder she loudly joined #TheResistance to obstruct his presidency.
The serial denialist Clinton later urged Joe Biden not to concede the 2020 election if he lost.
Also after 2016, left-wing third-party candidate and denialist Jill Stein vainly sued in courts to disqualify voting machine results in preselected states.
A denialist host of Hollywood C-list actors in 2016 cut television commercials begging members of the Electoral College to violate their oaths and instead flip the election to Hillary Clinton.
Clinton herself had hired foreign national Christopher Steele to concoct a dossier of untruths to smear her 2016 campaign opponent, Donald Trump.
The FBI took up Clinton’s failed efforts. It likewise paid in vain her ancillaries like Christopher Steele to “verify” the dossier’s lies.
The bureau further misled a FISA court about the dossier’s authenticity. An FBI lawyer even altered a document, as part of a government effort to disrupt a presidential transition and presidency.
The Clinton-FBI Russian collusion hoax was a small part of the progressive effort to warp the 2016 election result.
The Washington Post giddily bragged about various groups formed to impeach Trump in his first days in office, on the pretext he was illegitimately elected.
Rosa Brooks, an Obama Administration Pentagon lawyer, less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration wrote a long denialist essay in Foreign Policy outlining a strategy to remove the supposedly illegitimate president. She discussed the options of impeachment, the 25th Amendment—and even a military coup.
When rioting exploded in the streets of Washington D.C. after the election results became clear, Madonna infamously shouted to a mass crowd that she dreamed of blowing up the White House, presumably with the Trump family in it.
Was that not the most violent form of election denialism?
The election denialist Stacey Abrams became a media heartthrob and left-wing cult hero. Abrams monetized her ridiculous denialism (“voter suppression”) by stumping the country from 2018 to 2021 claiming, without evidence, that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was rigged. In truth, she lost by over 50,000 votes.
Time magazine’s Molly Ball in a triumphalist essay bragged that in 2020 a combination of Big Tech money from Silicon Valley—fueled by Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million infusion—absorbed the balloting collection and counting of several key voting precincts weighed to help Joe Biden.
Ball bragged of careful pre-election censoring of the contemporary news by Big Tech. Most notably, that effort spread the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was “Russian disinformation.”
Left-wing interest groups modulated the often-violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa street protests of 2020 in efforts to aid the Biden campaign.
Ball summed up that left-wing election engineering effort as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” and called it “the secret history of the 2020 election.”
So, who exactly were those “secret” warpers of the 2020 election?
As Ball put it: “A well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
It is entirely legitimate to question the probity and legality of those systematic left-wing efforts in key states to overturn long-standing voting laws passed by state legislatures.
Then followed an even larger effort to render Election Day a mere construct for the first time in American history. Over 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day, the vast majority of them (and by design) Biden votes. Somehow customary ballot disqualification rates of mail-in ballots in some states plunged—even as their numbers exploded.
The scariest form of election interference was the 2020 “cabal.” The FBI, Silicon Valley, street protestors, and the media all conspired to work for the “right result.”
Apparently, that “conspiracy” was the denialists’ response to the 2016 victory of Donald Trump that they never accepted.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on THERE IS NOTHING “UNPRECEDENTED ABOUT CHALLENGING ELECTION RESULTS. AND FOR DEMOCRATS, THERE IS NOTHING UNPRECEDENTED IN TRYING TO MANIPULATE THEM
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ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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