Vatican II

It is fashionable among many in the Church to lay the blame for the current sexual scandals in the Catholic Church at the feet of Vatican II.

This article from The Catholic Thing leans in that direction.

A deep reading of the history of the Church will reveal that the world’s evil has exerted a strong influence over the faithful since the beginning, and the Church always has to battle the world for their souls.

A reading of the 11th century Book of Gomorrah by St. Peter Damian about the scourge of sexual abuse in the Church at that time, reveals that, and a two part review of it noting the current connections, is available online: Part 1 and Part 2.

An excerpt from The Catholic Thing article.

“When he was cardinal of Krakow and the diocese faced a problem, Karol Wojtyla used to ask those working with him: “What is the truth of faith that sheds light on this problem?” He was head of a large diocese and yet he could work from the mind of the Church. In contrast, there are the memorable words of Cardinal Cushing (1895-1970), archbishop of Boston, to Catholic political leaders: “If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it.”

“A blank check for Catholic politicians – and by extension for every other Catholic – to go with what society believes rather than what the Church believes. And Cardinal Cushing was not the only one. Archbishop Wojtyła, on the other hand, made his starting point the teaching of the Church. His stance had a consistency – one of the reasons for his journey to sainthood – that needs to be recovered in the United States….

“The damage of uncritically going along with societal thinking is vast and almost unimaginable, given how many decades it has continued, largely unopposed, in America. At the very least, such thinking has deeply fragmented the Church, so that while we have one group working very hard to think with the mind of the Church, we have another confused and misled because this cardinal, or that senator, or a bishop or a priest is giving away the farm.

“And finally, there is a group working to make sure that the Church only teaches what is approved by secular culture – although why we would need yet another organization to promote that culture is beyond me. The great scandal of the fractures of the Church in the twentieth century has gone mostly unanswered and unchallenged, and no heads have rolled.

“Thinking with the mind of the Church would, for example, have nipped many of the sex scandals in the bud. Clergy who did things like that could not possibly continue in ministry. It is entirely irrelevant if the personnel director does not “understand” the culprit’s behavior. The actions are violations of the moral law and the Church can act on those grounds. It does not have to wait for psychological studies.

“But of course this would take unshakeable faith in the Church, and that faith was a casualty of a wrong reading of Vatican II. Having faith in the Church would have saved two billion dollars in payouts to victims, which could have been used to help the poor – whose patrimony it is.”