If a true Pope had overseen Vatican II…
The Council that could have been:
The Original Vatican II Drafts
The false pope Paul VI during Vatican II (1962-65)
It is October 11, 2017 today, which means it has been 55 years since the opening of the fateful assembly known as the “Second Vatican Council” on this day in 1962.
Usually abbreviated as “Vatican II”, this Modernist robber synod was ground zero for the New Religion, a religion that is a toxic mix of Liberalism, Modernism, Anglicanism, Gallicanism, and Freemasonry, all enclosed in a Catholic shell to make it palatable to the unsuspecting Catholic masses.
That it would take a false Pope to be able to ratify and promulgate it stands to reason, since a true Pope would be divinely prevented from doing so. This is where Cardinal Angelo Roncalli came in, the first modern-day usurper of the papal throne, who used — rather fittingly — the name of a 15th-century Antipope, to wit, “John XXIII”.
Although John XXIII — since 2014, a “saint” in the Novus Ordo Church — didn’t live long enough to promulgate a single Vatican II document, he did put everything in place for his successor. As one of his first “pontifical” acts, he appointed Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini a “cardinal”, who just so happened to succeed him as “Pope Paul VI” a few years later; he established the “Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity”, the Vatican body dealing with ecumenical affairs and relations with Jews (1960); he tinkered with the most sacred part of the Holy Mass by introducing the name of St. Joseph into the Canon (1962); he called the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (first announced in 1959; formally convoked in 1961; met from 1962-65); he ensured that the council would not condemn Communism (1962); and he promulgated the Masonic encyclical letter Pacem in Terris (1963), which putatively gave magisterial status to the error of religious liberty, which had always been condemned by the Church.
Interestingly enough, the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII had Roncalli tagged “suspect of heresy” for using a work on the Index of Forbidden Books as a textbook in class when he was seminary professor in Bergamo, Italy (the book in question was Louis Duchesne’s multi-volume Early History of the Christian Church). And at Vatican II, some French bishops called John XXIII a “precursor of the Antichrist”, and history has proved them, well, at least not wrong.
While we all know how Vatican II turned out and what insufferable ambiguous and error-laden documents the council produced, many are not aware that the original drafts of the conciliar constitutions were actually quite orthodox. The Secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani — who a few years later would become the protagonist in the “Ottaviani Intervention” against the “New Mass” of Paul VI — chaired the Central Preparatory Commission for the council. Its chief task was the putting together of preliminary documents — called schemas or schemata — that would be debated, voted on, and eventually promulgated in modified form, at the council.
With the conservative Cardinal Ottaviani having had the requisite authority to oversee the drafting of the conciliar documents, it is no surprise that the schemas are orthodox and reflect the traditional Roman Catholic position. The problem is that most of these schemas were never actually used. Shortly after the council opened, the Modernists succeeded in having the majority of the original schemas rejected, which they claimed were too “negative”, too “intolerant”, and not “pastoral” enough (in other words, they were Catholic). Fr. Ralph Wiltgen details the drama about the hijacking of the council in his book The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (now titled The Inside Story of Vatican II).
Thus many of the original Vatican II schemas that had been diligently prepared by orthodox Catholic theologians under the guidance of Cardinal Ottaviani, ended up in the trash and were replaced with texts promoting the Modernist Nouvelle Theologie (“New Theology”), which had formerly been condemned by Pope Pius XII. The result is what we know today as the documents of Vatican II.
Fr. Joseph Komonchak, a Novus Ordo theologian who specializes in ecclesiology, has translated six of the rejected original Vatican II schemas into English. These documents are now available to the public and can be downloaded here:
- Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Sources of Revelation
- Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution Defending Intact the Deposit of Faith
- Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Christian Moral Order
- Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on Chastity, Marriage, the Family and Virginity
- Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
- Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Blessed Virgin Mary
Comparing and contrasting these succinct and clear statements of traditional Catholic teaching with the Modernist junk the council ultimately produced, is eye-opening. The semi-traditionalist web site Unam Sanctam Catholicam makes the following insightful observations:
In reading these original schemas, one is struck by their clarity, their directness, and relative to the subsequent conciliar documents, their brevity. It is also interesting to see in what ways the content of these documents are notably different from the documents that were eventually promulgated. For example, “On the Sources of Revelation” states very plainly that there are two sources of revelation which constitute a single deposit of faith; [the Vatican II constitution] Dei Verbum, on the other, is emphatic that there is but one source of revelation which is passed on in two modes of transmission.
The source material is interesting as well. An examination of the footnotes of the discarded schemas reveals an abundant number of citations from Pascendi, Mortalium Animos, the Syllabus and even the anti-Modernist oath, none of which are cited in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example.
The tone is markedly different; instead of the humble “searching for truth” that we note in the conciliar documents, the original schemas lucidly and authoritatively proclaim the truth, as well as about the errors which pervert it. De fontibus revelationis [the draft on the sources of revelation], subject to so much scorn by the Council Fathers, issues several formal condemnations. In order to see the difference in tone between the two sets of documents, consider the first as passage from the schema “On the Christian Moral Order”, paragraph 6:
“[The Church] grieves, however, that many people are transgressing the divine law, more from weakness than from wickedness, though rarely without grave guilt. It notes with great horror that errors are being spread everywhere, errors that open the way to perdition and close the gate of salvation. There are those who deny a personal God and so deprive the natural law of its foundation; there are those who, repudiating the mission of Christ, reject the law of the Gospel; there are those who rely only on human principles in explaining the moral order and therefore rob it of its genuine and ultimate obligation and sanction… Their impiety and impudence reach such a point that they attempt to assault heaven and to remove God himself from the midst. With notorious wickedness and equal foolishness they are not afraid to state that there is no supreme, most wise and most provident God distinct from the universe; there are those who maintain that the moral law is subject to changes and to evolution even in fundamental matters…”
Now compare this with a parallel passage from [the Vatican II constitution] Gaudium et Spes chapter 21, also dealing with atheism:
“The Church calls for the active liberty of believers to build up in this world God’s temple too. She courteously invites atheists to examine the Gospel of Christ with an open mind.”
When the Council got underway, the progressive Council Fathers saw the schemas of Ottaviani as an obstacle to their program of reform. Cardinal Bea, one of the more influential Cardinals and a favorite of Pope John XXIII, explained to his progressive colleagues:
“We must help the Holy Father achieve his goals for the Council, the ones he expresses in his radio messages and in his exhortations. These are not the same as those of the schemas, either because the Theological Commission, which directs them, is closed to the world and to ideas of peace, justice, and unity, or because of the division of the work and a lack of co-ordination. They’ve made room for everything except the Holy Spirit.”
Thus, these schemas, which were ‘closed to the world’, were replaced with what we currently have, and the defects of which we are all well aware. As they were never adopted, these [original] schemas have no authority; but in reading them, one cannot help but contemplating the council that might have been.
(“Original Vatican II Schemas”, Unam Sanctam Catholicam; italics given.)
For those interested in more information about the errors promoted by the Second Vatican Council, the following links will be helpful:
- The Modernist Errors of Vatican II
- Vatican II: The Documents Examined
- The Doctrinal Errors of the Second Vatican Council
- Vatican II Decrees compared with Catholic Teaching
- What’s wrong with Vatican II? FAQs
- Does Vatican II meet the requirements for infallible teaching?
Within just a few weeks after the opening of Vatican II, the orthodox American theologian and council peritus Mgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton made the following comments in his diary: “This is going to mark the end of the Catholic religion as we have known it…. If I did not believe God, I would be convinced that the Catholic Church was about to end” (Diary entries for Oct. 31 and Nov. 23, 1962). Fenton’s personal diaries detail some of the struggles that took place behind the scenes of the council and are well worth a read:
Vatican II was indeed “the end of the Catholic religion as we have known it” for most people, who now do not in fact know the very Catholic religion Mgr. Fenton was referring to in his diary entry. This is the primary reason for the existence of Novus Ordo Watch: to educate people in the true Catholic religion and demonstrate that it is essentially different from the New Religion of the Vatican II Sect.
Given all of the above, it is clear that the Second Vatican Council could have been a genuinely Catholic and thus truly orthodox ecumenical council. Had its work been presided over and ratified by a genuine Catholic Pope, it would have been.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Lothar Wolleh)
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Only God can know the hearts of men, but how could the Vatican II popes not know the horror and damage they were unleashing on the Church and the world. I believe that most of them in spite of their high office had doubts about Catholicism and maybe God’s existence. Roncalli , Wojtyla , Montini and Bergoglio by their writing definitely belonged to the cult of man. The rest followed suit but in a little more stealthy fashion. As for the Bishops and Cardinals the sheep follow the shepherd but at some point when looking down at their reflection in the stagnant water they must have seen a goat instead of a lamb. There is no doubt that this heresy will end , how many more tears will be shed is up to the Holy Ghost , but it will end. The one comfort is that The Holy Spirit has allowed even those of us who lack worthiness have been blessed with the knowledge of the truth.
Some thoughts:
1) A true pope would not have convened a council at all.
2) “quite orthodox?” It is either orthodox or it is not. It does not admit of degrees.
3) The worms were into the woodwork long before the council. One can only speculate the damage done by Cardinal Bea, as confessor to Pius XII, to give just one example.
Please check the dictionary definition of “quite”. There is more than one meaning. 🙂
The question isn’t whether a true Pope would have convened a council or not (there is certainly nothing in the notion of ‘true Pope’ that would prevent it), but only that if he had ratified a council, it would have been Catholic.
Of the original drafts that CPC sent to the council fathers, On the sources of revelation is the only one they voted on, rejecting it by a simple majority (1,368 or 61%) on Nov. 20, 1962. Ratzinger harshly criticized it (Ratzinger Reader pp. 258 ff.), noting De fontibus revelationis “was, if one may use the label, utterly a product of the ‘anti-Modernist’ mentality,” which “persisted until its last reverberation sounded in the encyclical Humani generis of Pius XII. … Was the intellectual position of ‘anti-Modernism’ — the old policy of exclusiveness, condemnation and defence leading to an almost neurotic denial of all that was new — to be continued?” With the Nov. 20, 1962, vote, “The Council had resolutely set itself against perpetuating a one-sided anti-Modernism and so had chosen a new and positive approach.”
As komonchak wrote on his blog:
This is fascinating. Clearly, though, there were grave problems within the Church long before Vatican II. It’s clear that most of the Hierarchy was either modernist or didn’t see it for what it was. I don’t necessarily think that if the schemas had been adopted that it would have done anything but shall the modernist revolt.
I have to agree that those cardinals and bishops who still had the Catholic Faith did not fight for what was right. Maybe at the time they were utterly confused on how all of this could come about. God only knows. But remember that many of the cardinals and bishops who were around for St. Pius X, did not like the hard line that St. Pius X took. They did not like the Sodalitium Pianum. They thought that modern scholarship, and a more friendly attitude to new thinking was not harmful.
This whole revolution could have started in 1903, had Rampolla been elected. But by the grace of God, we were spared the revolt, the apostasia, and were given a Saint. And it was because of St. Pius X that the Modernists, the liturgical archaeologists and antiquariantists, the liberals, etc. all had to go into stealth mode. They waited.
They slowly came out of hiding during pope Benedict XV’s reign, and gained ascendency by the time of pope Pius XII’s death. It is very credible that Cardinal de Lai may very well have said that “Humanly speaking, the Church is finished,” when pope Benedict VX was elected. What was needed was a pope to continue St. Pius X’s offensive war on Modernists. That is not what we got.
English speaking Catholics usually refer to the last book of Sacred Scripture as Apocalypse, not Revelation. Your text started with Apocalypse 21:7 and continued through Apocalypse 21:8
“He that shall overcome shall possess these things, and I will be his God; and he shall be my son. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, they shall have their portion in the pool burning with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” (Douay-Rheims).