Healing the Healthy

   Relative of the Sick Person: “Doctor, Ralph is only getting much worse.”

Doctor:  “That’s because he hasn’t yet received enough of the prescribed medicine for a long enough period of time.”

Relative:  “But the symptoms of illness only really began with the taking of this medicine.”

Doctor:  “Well, we can only take refuge in the knowledge that he would have been by now, in spite of his seeming health before, much worse off without the medicine.”

Relative:  “I don’t understand.  Ralph’s symptoms are getting only worse:  his heart is weaker, he’s much less conscious, his appetite is gone, and he can hardly stand up on his own.”

Doctor: “In defense of the regimen, I would say that these “symptoms” are really “signs” of his body finally and healthily adjusting itself....”

Relative:  “Does that mean death?”

Doctor:  “Possibly, but would that not be better for him than living on as he did with all that vigor and activity which merely hid from him a lurking disease?”

Relative:  “What disease?”

Doctor:  “The one the medicine is designed to cure.”

Relative:  “But I don’t think there was a disease....”

Doctor:  “Well, if his body will not conform itself to this medicine, then it is obviously and hopelessly diseased and doesn’t deserve to live.” 

      Almost the same logic as the doctor’s has been being applied to the situation of the Church for the last few generations.  A “medicine” has been prescribed, the effects of which seem more and more to be lethal, and yet we are constantly told that these “symptoms” are really “signs” of a “new work” of the Holy Spirit, who’s doing a “new thing” in the Church, etc.  Actually the very opposite is just now beginning to happen:  that is, these doses of “medicine,” so “needed” by the Church, have been greatly reduced, and real signs of life have begun to reappear.

      But what symptoms?  They’ve been well documented over the last fifty years or so:  the collapse of religious life, the near emptying of the seminaries, the steady and sharp decline in Mass attendance, the scandals in the priesthood (the majority of which stem from the late sixties, seventies and early eighties), the widespread ignorance of the faith, especially among the young, and the overall loss of Catholic identity among so many of the members of the Church. 

      And what “medicine” am I speaking of?  No, I am not at all talking about the Second Vatican Council, even if so many have claimed that the Council called for this deadly “cure.”  How often I have heard, and heard about, the claims that Vatican II “liberated” the religious from their confines, did away with the distinction between laity and priesthood, banished Latin, chant and pipe organ from the Liturgy, abrogated the Traditional Latin Mass (now truly liberated by Pope Benedict), diminished the authority of the Holy See, put an end to the cult of the Saints, ad nauseam.  None of this is true, of course.  All one has to do, as I’ve repeatedly encouraged people to do, is read the documents, and to read them in the only context that is legitimate (as the Council Fathers themselves said), and that is according to the Church’s Tradition. 

      So what is this medicine?  If we were to read the label of the prescription on the medicine bottle, we would discover those most esoteric and nebulous words “the spirit of Vatican II” – a completely, or nearly so, disembodied spirit:  if the documents do not say what the “doctor” wants, he can always appeal to that “higher,” so very gnostic, authority of the “spirit.”  He can, that is, through the spirit of Vatican II say almost anything he desires.  But these self-anointed “doctors” do not speak out of a vacuum; they have their own “context” (in contrast to the Church’s Tradition) out of which they read and propound the “real meaning” of the Council.  And that context is the decade in which Vatican II occurred, the 1960s, a decade when the forces of secularization, long active, came to a head and swept all before it, summed up in the words of Ivan Fyodorovich, Dostoevsky’s character, “If there is no God, then everything is permissible.”  The medicine that evolved from this brew is simply this:  the Church should conform herself to the world.  That’s why the “prophets” of the Spirit of Vatican II are nearly always in favor of the “fruits” of the sexual revolution of that decade and passionately push for the Church to change – as if she could – her teaching on sexual morality.  But that’s only part of the program:  it was to be a massive movement in the Church to welcome the world as the standard to which she must conform.

      Here is needed the questioning wisdom of the Relative of the Sick Person:  the symptoms of the application of this medicine do not look very good, very healthful.  The proponents of it themselves are dying off, leaving few followers, today’s young being either more or less indifferent to the “new” Catholic faith or vibrantly “reactionary” as they are dubbed.  Some in the new generation have grown suspicious of this hermeneutic of the “spirit of Vatican II,” so allied as it is with the secular agenda, especially as they notice that its effects in our society and culture have been by and large devastating.  (Look around you!) 

      If we were to read the documents of Vatican II, we would discover a completely different message and program:  Vatican II actually called for the proclamation of the Church’s unchanging message in new and effective ways for the sake of a world in need of curing.  That is, the Church’s message is the real medicine.