By Michael Voris
Hello everyone and welcome to The Vortex where lies and falsehoods are trapped and
exposed. I’m Michael Voris.
With this week’s onset of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.. many Catholics around the world have been holding their breaths.. fearing that a round of tradition bashing would be unleashed.
It appears that has begun. The lead-off hitter appears to be Little Rock Arkansas Bishop Anthony Taylor.
He has just released an audio version of his take on Vatican II. We have attached a link for you to hear.. if you can stomach it.
Now let’s be clear right from the outset.. this is not a challenge to the bishop’s authority or anything of the kind.
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It is the mindset that most of what went on before the Second Vatican Council was bad or insufficient or deficient or somehow not correct and that practically everything that happened after the council was good and better and some coming of age fulfillment of a “BETTER” church.
So with that in mind.. we are exploring Bishop Taylor’s assessment of the Church before Vatican II and after.
It begins about 4 minutes in on his audio. His point of reference is his own childhood memories of how terrible things were then and how blessedly blissful they are now.
"I was in 8th grade when Mass began to be celebrated in English. I had been an altar boy in Latin since 4th grade. So I remember vividly the before, during and after of Vatican II." - Bishop Anthony TaylorIf that is his base of authority on which to speak.. that he lived before during and after the Council.. then we think that His Excellency needs to be reminded that there are MANY MANY people who have the same base of lived experience who would disagree full throatedly with his points and conclusions.
First.. he has a self-admittedly four year experience with the Pre-Vatican II days.. from when he was 10-14 years old.. not a particularly mature platform that.. your middle school years.. to be making vast sweeping judgments about the world.
He first mentions a “ghetto” experience of the Church.
"It's really hard for young people today to have any concept of the ghetto mentality that pervaded the Church 50 years ago." - Bishop Anthony TaylorReally? A Catholic GHETTO?
Let’s look at those pre-council days and consider the utter absurdity of that observation.
And how about Loretta Young who, on her NATIONAL television series over several years, played Sister Ann, head of nursing at a Catholic hospital who was seen IN FOUR EPISODES making visits to the Blessed Sacrament, blessing herself with holy water, blatantly showing her trust in God etc.
And there was the series special "Road to Lourdes" about, well, Lourdes. And speaking of Lourdes.. how about the 1943 FOUR time Oscar winning movie The Song of Bernadette?
And what about "Dial O for O'Malley," Bing Crosby in "Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's" who, while obviously an idealized portrayal of a Catholic priest, was close enough to NORMAL experience of Catholic priests that he could inspire you rather than make you laugh at the absurdity of the idealization.
And how about Pat O'Brien and Spencer Tracy as Fr. Duffy and Fr. Flanagan respectively with Tracy taking home the best acting Oscar.
Catholics of the day had no shared anything to speak of except their faith. We didn’t dress alike .. have the same ethnic backgrounds.. eat the same foods.. do the same work.. live in the same places.
Heck.. in many cases.. depending on the ethnic background the original different groups of immigrants .. we didn’t even have the same devotions. Of course there were shared experiences.. but those experiences were rooted in the faith .. our beliefs .. what is called our Catholic identity.
Incidentally.. it is that same Catholic identity that many bishops in the US has stated quite openly we need to discover again. How prey tell can we re-discover and live our Catholic identity without fear of returning to the ghetto? There appear to be contradictions even among the bishops on this point.
His Excellency seems to have bought into a revisionist history of a time largely before he was born.
Now here was another humdinger.. that Catholics were discouraged from reading the bible for fear of misinterpreting it.
"I remember well what it was like to be discouraged from reading the bible out of fear of misinterpreting it..." - Bishop Anthony TaylorWell, given the MASSIVE misinterpretations that have resulted from individual reading of Sacred Scripture all the way back to Martin Luther and the 500 years since, it seems that' s a pretty legitimate concern.
Even today.. all over the western world.. Catholics gather for “Bible Studies” that are nothing more than “tell me how that passage makes you FEEL sessions.” That’s not bible study and it most certainly is not learning about the scriptures with the mind and heart of the Church.
That Catholics don’t KNOW the Bible is a Protestant canard. Sure many may not know book.. chapter and verse .. as if that’s really all that important anyway.. but faithful Catholics absolutely do know those scriptural truths.. whether they could cite the book or not.
Then he goes on to say how Catholics were discouraged from interacting with Protestants in formal worship settings.
"...and to be forbidden to attend practically anything except funerals in a non-Catholic church out of fear of contagion." - Bishop Anthony TaylorYep. From the point of view of our eternal lives.. what is to be gained from formally associating with people who subscribe to a heresy.
That isn’t to say shun them and be rude to them and un-Christian and uncharitable and don't invite them to barbeques. But it is to say that to mingle truth with heresy in a form that appears to be condoning of error will bode nothing but bad.
“Sharing” our faith traditions with each other gives the impression that all of them are equally valid.. and they are not.
Unless your goal is to evangelize and convert them.. what’s the point. It’s like dating a girl you aren’t gonna marry. Sure you might have some laughs or fun times along the way.. but in the end.. what’s the point? The Catholic life has a very definite end.. and it is salvation and bringing others to it.
His Excellency.. in a not so veiled slam.. implies that all that went before Vatican II was not really what Jesus taught.
"The Council Fathers realized that this is not what Jesus taught, and that it was time for us to lay aside our fear of the outside world." - Bishop Anthony TaylorTHANK GOD for 1962 when the Church FINALLY came into existence. Most of those previous 1900 years were not REALLY what Jesus taught.
In a broad and dismissive statement.. totally unbecoming of his role as a successor of the Apostles.. he says that today’s young people who are – notice the language here – GRIPPED – by a nostalgia for a time they never knew.. they just don’t realize what “those” days were really like.
"Many of those, who today seem so gripped with nostalgia for the time before Vatican II, have no actual lived experience of what those days were really like." - Bishop Anthony Taylor
Oh the horror of what the Church must have been like in “those days”.
Imagine.. balanced books in parishes .. Catholic educational institutions popping up everywhere.. converts coming to the Faith by the hundreds of thousands.. award winning movies.. number-one ranked TV programs.. best-selling books.. so many vocations that we could actually export religious to the missions.. instead of now importing priests to shrinking parishes.
And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he takes direct aim at the Traditional Latin Mass.. a Mass he comes close to portraying as a kind of meaningless waste of time for the laity that had no real connection to anything.
Excuse me Your Excellency.. but that MASS was what brought my father into the Faith in the late 1950’s.. a Faith that he passed on to me. And his experience was certainly not singular.. millions of people came into the Church because of the solemnity and mystery of that Mass.. unlike the abuse ridden current Mass .. which while absolutely valid.. has resulted in a near collapse of the Faith in the west.
That’s why the Pope and many others in the Church are taking a long hard look at what’s gone wrong and trying in fits and starts to fix it. It’s why we have a new translation for Mass each Sunday.. to be faithful to the original Latin.
To paint pre-Vatican II types as either nostalgic children too stupid to understand what things were “really” like.. as if YOU or others are the sole expert.. or a bunch of old doddering dementia victims is an approach that should elicit an apology.
What do we have now? Look around Your Excellency, look around. A near bankrupt bureaucracy that needs to run one fundraising campaign after another to fleece the flock to make up for billions paid out in legal costs for homosexual predator priests.. and shrinking congregations.. nuns who hop on a bus and travel the nation’s highways whipping up support for a child murdering president.. 2000 parishes closed in twenty years.
With all due respect Your Excellency.. you need to drop the revisionist history and get out more. More on this tomorrow.
GOD Love you,
I’m Michael Voris
Links:
Related:
- Vatican II Turns Fifty – Part I: Catholic in an Age of Discontent
- Cardinal Schonborn Cuts 75% of Parishes
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