Six Decades of Data Show: "The Council Was A Failure"
He believes that the Church needed "some adaptions" after the death of throne-and-altar politics, the rise of liberalism, globalisation, decolonisation, the information age and the social revolutions.
Now, six decades of data show that Vatican II was a failure because it "failed on the terms its own supporters set." It was supposed to make the Church more attractive, dynamic, less closed off and self-referential. "It did none of these things,” Douthat concludes.
The Novus Ordo was supposed to make the faithful more engaged with the Mass but "instead, the faithful began sleeping in on Sunday and giving up Catholicism for Lent.”
The Church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under "conservative" and "liberal" popes alike losing Europe to secularism and Latin America to Pentecostalism.
The time after Vatican II became consumed with right-versus-left battles. The Novus-Ordo Church engaged with the world as a "paltry imitation" via middling guitar music, dressed-up versions of left-wing partisanship, and ugly modern churches that were outdated ten years after they were built and empty soon thereafter.
For Douthat there is no way back to the style of papal authority that both John Paul II and Francis have tried to exercise — the former [allegedly] "to restore tradition," the latter to suppress it — "only to find themselves frustrated by the ungovernability of the modern Church.“
Picture: © Lothar Wolleh, wikicommons CC BY-SA, #newsNpobhxlxis