A Tale of Two Year Zeros

A revolution for Catholics

Submitted byAlan Schmidt

For those enmeshed in Catholic politics, it’s well known that another phase of the Synod of Synodality was completed in Rome, culminating with a document that, while changing no doctrine, laid the groundwork to completely upend the organization and principles of the Church. All the greatest hits were in there, a call for more nuance with regards to homosexual pairings, women deacons, married priests, a more democratic vote of the faithful, the whole gambit.

Anyone following knows of the typical shenanigans employed to come to their pre-ordained conclusions, whether it being stacking the deck of Bishops and advisors attending to be overwhelmingly supportive of the proposed overhauls, the listening sessions that only listened to certain approved people, and the bureaucracy-speak that made objecting to anything feel like punching at air.

They had no hesitation about expressing the reason for this revolution, saying pretty much explicitly that everything they are doing is based on the work started at Vatican II. If one looks at the documents and talks, one would be hard pressed to find anything even hinting at a time before this council completely transformed the Church, from the Liturgy, to Catechesis, to architecture. While fewer and fewer people lived in the 1970’s, a lot of the older generation told of beautiful, pristine churches completely gutted to comply with the new, minimalistic approach that set the viewer’s eyes on the congregation instead of the Altar. They will speak of the massive whiplash of the new mass and the odd new ways of teaching the faith. Still, they relented, since they still trusted their leadership.

For decades, conservative Catholics expressed dismay at the wreckage employed by the faithful as well as the clergy to better conform to the Spirit of Vatican II. They pointed to the part of the document that expressed Latin as having primacy of place to Bishops and priests who turned a blind eye. They sifted through the documents to convince the Church wreckers that nowhere in the Vatican II documents did it express anything close to the Liturgical revisions they espoused. They defended Vatican II with fanatical zeal and told everyone that if only Vatican II was implemented right, everything would turn out okay.

It’s no surprise that this old conservative bulwark considered societies trying to keep the old ways intact, like the SSPX, as beyond the pale while trying to explain away all the strange actions John Paul II and Paul VI did for the sake of ecumenism that every pope pre-Vatican II would die before doing. Now the revolution is continuing with breakneck speed, and Pope Benedict’s Hail Mary pass of The Hermeneutic of Continuity to keep everything together now utterly discredited. Only now have the trads become ascendant as the old guard has either died off or has no answers to the current crisis.

The United States had its own year zero with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Hart-Cellar Immigration act. With the stroke of a pen, freedom of association was destroyed and the idea of the country as a people made way for anyone being able to be an American just by walking on its soil. While technically a legal document, the repercussions went far beyond the letter of the next. They were truly spiritual documents. As Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement shows well, the transformation of the United States to a civil rights regime became complete.

One doesn’t have to go through the similar story of the conservative bulwarks in American politics that kept their influence for fifty years, the purging of the heretics who questioned the new sacred documents of the American Empire, or the complete capitulation of the right on any traditional values. The spiritual revolution of the 1960’s upended any previous precedent, one many thought could still be reconciled with the old ways.

The American system is now in crisis, as there is a contingent who still believes in the spirit of George Washington and the Founding Fathers, the tragic tale of the Civil War, and the glorious conquest of the frontier. They still believe in the sprit of individual grit and resolve, the land that gives freedoms found nowhere else, and the culture that fosters greatness. The other contingent believes the United States only became a proper country after the CRA, and any vestiges of the old country is something fit only to be lambasted and ridiculed. The founding stock was evil, and it took almost two hundred years for the chains of their oppression to slacken. The key question has become, is Year Zero 1776 or 1964?

For the new Catholic Church to come out of the papacy of Francis, Year Zero was a year later, in 1965. Here humanism began to triumph against the constant oppression of clericalism, judgmental thinking, and exclusion. Now humanity can come together around something that looks vaguely Catholic, even as Church attendance has taken a dive into the abyss. The only enemies are the ones who aren’t on board, like those trads. Sodomites, divorcees, and prostitutes we walk with, but the trads have to get with the program.

When Francis began his suppression of the Latin Mass, his stated reason was to avoid parallel Churches being formed. It may sound strange how a Liturgy spoken for almost the entire age of the Church could create a parallel Church, until one is forced to come to the conclusion that it is a parallel Church, and a faithful churchgoer of one hundred years ago would not recognize what anyone at the Vatican said as being Catholic. In this case, Francis is right, and unlike the more conservative pope Benedict, he understands you don’t allow separate power centers to develop that can disrupt your goals. The way of politics now is to silence your enemies while talking about dialogue and crushing their ability to exist while talking of mercy.

Once can’t help but notice the similarities of language between the two ascendant regimes. Anyone in a corporation is familiar with free flow of sweet-sounding words devoid of any substance, lulling the reader into sleep before giving any tangible new knowledge, and everyone is aware that the writers are going to do what they want, as the listening sessions, the discussions, and everything else in the process is a theatrical attempt at public legitimacy, a legitimacy a good portion of the population no longer believes in.

When the revolution moves to the next ratchet, the narrative is all too familiar, and schizophrenic. As the Civil Rights revolution is reaching its conclusion, the institutional powers have expressed their open contempt of the founding stock, exclaiming their need to get with the new program, all the while trying to plea to their sense of duty and civic responsibility. They think they can still play this card even as they destroy the mythologies of the founding stock and with it, the sense of belonging the people have to their country. As military recruitment has plummeted and whites have found it necessary to avoid the eye of the new regime, the screams of racism and intolerance have lost their impact on a people who have become completely dispossessed of their heritage. Now they resort to overt force.

In the post-Vatican II world, Catholics have an easier option to simply leave the Church. Paradoxically, as the Church tries to ingratiate itself with the modern zeitgeist, the easier its more secular adherents find just breaking the bonds entirely. After all, if the Church’s leaders are falling over themselves to say there’s nothing special about Catholicism, they are more than willing to take them at their word. Instead of finding the conservative Catholics leaving, the progressives are leaving, and taking their children with them.

The adherents of the old guard of Catholicism, the ones who believe the Church began at 33 A.D. understand if the teachings of the faith are true, there’s nowhere else to go. Truly, “yours are the words of eternal life.” They also understand that no one, not Bishops, not the Pope, can say something that was once false is now true, or vice versa. Hence, as the contradictions between pre-Vatican II and the post-Vatican II revolution have become insurmountable, the middle ground has collapsed.

The Vatican, understanding the predicament, are trying to stifle the insurgent traditionalists, even as they hemorrhage Church members worldwide. At the rate things are going, in a few generations the only people who are going to Church will be the trads in their alcoves, de-facto separated from the Diocesan structures the Vatican counts on to keep them in line. Shouting obedience to the trads, even as they pontificate the necessity of dialogue and openness, has had the predictable effect of creating contempt in the congregation that once gave them the most reverence.

Talk of balkanization and schism is pointless, as this has already happened. In both situations, we have leadership in ideological capture in charge of all the major institutions who want revolution. On the other side there is a small but nimble contingent either trying to survive with the old ways or finding new paths to break from the clutches of modernity. What they lack for in numbers and money they make up for in intellectual capital, and the vision of a better way.

The only question that remains now is whether the revolution can be countered. Can the old civic ideals of the historical nation be reborn and push the woke back? Can the Catholic Church break from its breakneck path to becoming a glorified NGO to something closer to the ideas of Christ? Can these institutions be torn away from their current corrupt caretakers, or will the gates of hell prevail? If history is any indication, it would take an act of God.