VATICAN II SHORT – SIGHTED

Poor modern man, so drastically short-sighted,

His whole life being, by that short sight, blighted!

If we want to save our souls for eternity, as God wants all of us to do (I Tim. II,4), then the world now surrounding us is a dangerous environment for that purpose because, broadly speaking, for seven centuries mankind has been slowly but surely demoting God in order to take His place. It is a foolish attempt, doomed to fail, but in the meantime it has brought mankind to the brink of nuclear suicide. Now, on that road to ruin, from the Incarnation onwards, the greatest obstacle to the folly of man was God’s own Church instituted by God’s own Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the continuation of His Incarnation amongst men, as the Light of the World to dispel men’s confusion, and the Salt of the Earth to prevent men’s corruption. Alas, Vatican II in the 1960’s was the summit of men’s attempts to serve the Devil by crippling that Church, so as to send all men’s souls to Hell instead of Heaven. From here came the confusion and corruption all around us.

But Vatican II had to be subtle, because by the 20^th century Mother Church had already analysed and refuted the great errors leading up to Vatican II, especially Protestantism (1517) and its progeny, Liberalism (1717) and Communism (1917). Among the host of errors accompanying these three, surely the most dangerous was Modernism (1907), because it was led by priests from inside the Church, wishing to update God’s Church by adapting it to godless modern man. Therefore subtlety was needed to deceive Catholics alerted to Protestantism in all its forms (and for the same reason, even more subtlety will be needed by the Antichrist to fool a mankind alerted by the divine Chastisement occurring between now and then).

When Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, one of his hopes was that the Society of priests which he had founded in 1970 would work on the subtle errors of Vatican II to analyse and denounce them. This is precious work for the salvation of souls, and one book is outstanding in this respect, Prometheus, the Religion of Man, by Fr Alvaro Calderon, translated into French and published last May by the Society’s printing-house in France, accessible at www.clovis-diffusion.com The book is not an easy read, but it is highly to be recommended for its masterly thomistic breakdown of Vatican II. Here for instance is, in very brief form, the first major error of Vatican II, denounced by Fr Calderon:

Man must be the centre of religion, because he is, amongst all other material creatures, the only creature that is also spiritual. Therefore he is superior to all of them, he is the main purpose of all of them, and he is the main purpose of all material creation, being the only creature created for himself, all other material creatures having been created only for him. Therefore he must be at the centre of any true religion of that creation.

But all of this argument leaves out the Creator. If we start out from God and not from man, then we know that the one and only ultimate cause of the creation of man must be the essence of God Himself, because the one and only object possible of God’s willing anything at all is His own goodness, because that infinite goodness alone can fulfil His infinite willing. Any creature and everything that He chooses freely to create, He can only will in and through His willing of His own uncreated Self.

Therefore it can only be Himself, and not man, who is the ultimate purpose of creation, and He alone who can be at the centre of any true religion of that creation. All of the arguments in the documents of Vatican II which attempt to put man instead of God at the centre of creation around us, fail, for ignorance, witting or unwitting, wilful or unwilful, of Catholic Tradition’s supreme treasures of philosophy and theology. Thus one of the last and worst of all the Vatican II documents, Gaudium et Spes, is, says Fr Calderon, shot through with the very inadequate modern philosophy of Personalism, by which the human person is at the centre of everything. No, he is not. It is God who is at the centre of everything.

Kyrie eleison