Gaudium et Spes - The Mirage Dissipating?

Gaudium et Spes – the Mirage Dissipating?

From TradWiki

A MIRAGE THAT DISAPPEARS

The mirage of Vatican II is disappearing in many Catholic circles. As the winds of reality blow over it, people are realizing its errors and fantasy. I am speaking specifically about the feature article of the May 2003 issue of The Catholic World Report entitled “The End of Gaudium et Spes,” questioning the objectivity and feasibility of this pastoral constitution. The article casts doubt on not only Gaudium et Spes, but also the ensemble of Vatican II. The piece, written by James Hitchcock, a Professor of History at St. Louis University and founder of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, is solid, honest, and worthy of being included in the files of any researcher on the topic. Taking just one excerpt:–

Hitchcock observes:

“In many ways the promise of the Council has not been fulfilled, as the immediate effect of the Council …. was to plunge the Church into an internal crisis more severe than any other in her History. The crisis was provoked by the fact that, almost immediately at the Council’s end, there occurred the worldwide cultural phenomenon now popularly known as ‘the Sixties,’ amounting to nothing less than a frontal assault on all forms of authority. The cultural map itself changed rapidly, so that many of the assumptions found in the conciliar decrees were rendered obsolete. The Council fathers apparently had no inkling of that coming crisis; the task of ‘reading the signs of the times’ was apparently far more difficult than was imagined in the euphoric days of the early 1960s.”

Even though this conclusion is not an original one, I praise Hitchcock for his honest portrayal of the reality. The Council did, in fact, initiate the worst ecclesiastical crisis in the History of the Church. It also failed to see the reality of the world to which it claimed the Church should adapt. Hitchcock’s sharp irony is worthy of note: the conciliar fathers grandiosely imagined themselves as “prophets” predicting the future, but they were not able to correctly analyse even the present times that were before their very eyes…

Hitchcock made some other interesting points:

• Regarding Vatican II: The optimism of the Council and its omission to identify the evil of the modern world tacitly promoted the coming crisis in the Church;

• Regarding John Paul II: He was not the “reactionary” the media presents; he did next to nothing about the sex-abusers in the clergy; he avoided facing the mass apostasy in the Church; many of his arguments are open to discussion:

(his denial of capital punishment

and the past doctrine of just war,

his affirmation that the “root causes” of terrorism are poverty and lack of human rights);

• Regarding socio-political issues:

The defeat of Communism was not caused by dialogue with the atheists;

the full support given by the Vatican to the United Nations is incomprehensible seeing that this organization is clearly anti-Catholic, promoting “sexual freedom” and the legalization of abortion as human rights.

I would add here that the Council Fathers, God love them, made the gaffe of the century in priding themselves, in Gaudium et Spes, on "reading the Signs of the Times". The most glaring of all "Signs of the Times" in 1963 was the aggressive advance of world Communism, which was absorbing never fewer than two countries per year into the Empire of Lies. Yet Gaudium et Spes – in fact the Vatican Council as a whole – simply ignores the whole thing. This outrageous omission is surely sufficient in itself to discredit Vatican II for all time.

Hitchcock goes even further. A little before finishing his article he raises this courageous question: Isn’t such optimism heretical since it does not acknowledge the existence of sin?

It is good to know that there is a growing number of concerned Catholics who are no longer being held by the magic spell of Vatican II and are abandoning their blind-obedience to the progressivist religious authority.

Compiled from various sources

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