Immediately, some of the younger colleagues in the press corps began to murmur and one of them groaned just loud enough for at least some of us to hear, "O god, here we go again... the Council."

The incident sprang to mind this past week while reading some of the negative remarks about Vatican II that have shown up in the press and on social media to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Council's opening on October 11, 1962.

Disparaging Vatican II is not today the hobby it had become during the previous pontificate when the ultra-traditionalist critics of the Council were able to gain greater prominence and influence in Rome and many parts of the Church around the world.

And that is thanks to Pope Francis.

The first pope ordained a priest after the Council

"I think his great contribution to date has been the reconnecting of the Church with the energy of the Second Vatican Council," Cardinal Donald Wuerl told America back in February 2017, just a few weeks before the fourth anniversary of Francis' election to the papacy.

The Argentine Jesuit, who is the first Roman Pontiff to be ordained a priest after Vatican II, took up the papal ministry at a time when it was not fashionable to speak positively of the Council as anything more than an event that had come and gone.

His predecessor, Benedict XVI, had perhaps unwittingly helped fuel a so-called "reform of the (liturgical) reform" movement by granting permission for the near-unlimited celebration — and the active promotion — of the pre-Vatican II liturgy.

Francis has, since, all but pulled the plug on that.

As Paul VI foresaw at the very beginning of the post-Conciliar period, refusal to fully accept the reformed liturgy would be just the beginning of calling into question many other aspects of Vatican II, even the entire Council.

How did we ever get disconnected from the "energy" of Vatican II, which Cardinal Wuerl talks about, in the first place?

The end of "silly season" or a clampdown on reform?

It did not happen during Paul VI's pontificate or in the first couple years after John Paul II's election. But as the Polish pope's nearly 27-year-long pontificate gathered pace, he and the people he brought to work in the Roman Curia began a determined effort to impose a particularly circumscribed vision of what Vatican II meant and how it was to be implemented.

Some cheered this as an end to "silly season" — as Kathleen Kaveny reminded us this week — and as a rescue mission to bring the drifting Barque of Peter safely back to port.

Others bemoaned it as an iron-fisted clampdown on the Council's spirit of renewal and reform. Conformity and obedience to Rome became the operating model and those who did not get into line — clerics and theologians, especially — were censured or removed.

Anyone who dared to evoke the "spirit of Vatican II", which had been considered the interpretive key of what happened and was decided at the Council in the initial years of the post-conciliar period, was mercilessly derided.

John Paul's "restoration" project, as many of his "dissenters" called it, was all but complete by the time the charismatic pope died in 2005 and Joseph Ratzinger, the soft-spoken theologian who had constructed the doctrinal backbone of his long pontificate, took John Paul's place on the Chair of Peter as Pope Benedict.

The "reform of the reform" crowd becomes the tail wagging the dog

A new hermeneutical key quickly emerged, solidifying the thesis that the meaning of Vatican II could only be found in the official documents it issued, and concluding with the assertion that the texts presented a "reform in continuity" with all that happened before the Council.

But the "reform of the reform" crowd hijacked this interpretive key and took it a step further, claiming a "hermeneutic of continuity" that justified the recovery and return of anything from the Church's past, even that which had been reformed in the wake of the Council.

During Benedict's eight-year pontificate proponents of this "reform of the reform" movement — even though they were then and remain now a small minority in the global Church — ascended to top Vatican jobs and were promoted to major dioceses around the world.

It is no exaggeration to say that they became that tail that was wagging the dog.

Synodality and the laity

The tail has not been severed.

It remains, since many of these men are bishops or cardinals who still hold key positions and can continue to exercise an oversized influence in the Church.

Generally not in line with Francis' vision of reform, most of these hierarchs are quietly and carefully biding their time.

The 85-year-old pope is very much aware of this. And that is one of the reasons he has been so focused — almost to the point of obsession — on trying to implement synodality at every level of the Church.

He surely knows that making Catholic lay people a constitutive part of the Church's decision-making processes is a way to counter the influence of the "reform of the reform" minority.

And if that happens it will also help ensure that the Church is not once again disconnected from the energy — indeed, the spirit — of the Second Vatican Council.

• Robert Mickens is LCI Editor in Chief.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

In his Sunday sermon, Bishop Robert Barron said, "Dumbed down Catholicism has not helped evangelisation. Quite the contrary, we did this to ourselves".

The bishop is a controversial figure on both the secular left and right for his nonpartisan ethical advice and largely apolitical social advocacy.

Barron, 62, of the Dioceses of Winona-Rochester, is the most widely-followed online Catholic cleric in the country aside from Pope Francis. His public influence stretches worldwide via his books, videos, radio shows and documentaries with his Word on Fire ministries.

"So, in a way, we met the enemy, and it's us. We did such a bad job as teaching our faith and making it beautiful and making it intellectually compelling," Barron told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview.

"Many of the disaffiliated [Christians who left their church and no longer claim religious affiliation] have said, ‘I never got my questions answered. I had all kinds of questions. I never got good answers'".

Barron blamed the continuing decline of church attendance — at least in the Catholic rite — on weak spiritual education and a disordered emphasis on approachability.

He said, "We reduced religion — often to feel good — to ethics."

Many traditionalist Catholics point to Vatican II as a reason for the decay in Catholic theological education.

Changes at Vatican II included dropping the requirement for masses to be said in Latin, a greater emphasis on church community, and modifying the liturgy to allow greater participation from the pews.

Barron dismisses critics of the council, saying instead that the damage was done after the council when priests and prelates failed to implement its ideas intelligently.

"[The errors occurred] after the council, not because of the council," Barron said. "It was a pastoral disaster."

In an attempt to reorient the church for the modern times, Barron argues too much emphasis was put on the temporal works of charity and justice — but at the cost of the crucial necessity of theology.

"The church was often reduced to ethics and more precisely, to social justice. Nothing wrong with ethics or social justice, but it was a kind of reductionism and the doctrinal element was underplayed," Barron continued. "A caving in to the very relativistic culture held sway. So that's been a problem for a long time."

Sources

Fox News

Nevertheless, he insisted that there was no turning back.

Francis said the refusal to accept the reforms of the Second Vatican Council is the major problem facing the Church today.

"In the European Church I see more renewal in the spontaneous things that are emerging: movements, groups, new bishops who remember that there is a Council behind them," said Francis.

He added that those seeking to roll back Vatican II's reforms have gained a strong foothold in the United States.

"The current problem of the Church is precisely the non-acceptance of the Council," the 85-year-old Roman Pontiff said.

"Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of ‘restorers' - for example, in the United States, there are many - is significant." He added that he knew some priests for whom the 16th century Council of Trent was more memorable than the 20th century Vatican II.

Vatican II offered a blueprint for contemporary Catholicism by seeking to better connect the Church with the essentials of Christianity and update the methods whereby it would carry out its mission.

Among the reforms of Vatican II, which took place from 1962 to 1965, was the approval of the translation of the liturgy from Latin into vernacular languages. This was an effort to make the Mass more accessible and involve greater participation of the laity.

Restorationists argue that the changes led to a loss of mystery and a sense of transcendence in Catholic worship.

They have become some of Francis' fiercest critics, accusing him of heresy for his opening to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, outreach to gay Catholics and other reforms.

Francis has taken an increasingly hard line against them, including re-imposing restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass. He has taken specific action in dioceses and religious orders where restorationist Catholics have been gagging reforms.

Francis commented to the editors, "It is also true that it takes a century for a council to take root. We still have forty years to make it take root, then!"

Sources

• Religion News
• The Tablet
• National Catholic Reporter