A.        The Second Vatican Council

            Within the perspective of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the greatest success attained by the smiling post-Stalinist communism was the Second Vatican Council's enigmatic, disconcerting, incredible, and apocalyptically tragic silence about communism.

            It was the desire of this Council to be pastoral and not dogmatic. And, in fact, it did not have a dogmatic scope. But its omission regarding communism might make it go down in history as the apastoral Council.

            We shall explain the special sense in which we make this statement.

            Imagine an immense flock languishing in poor, arid fields and being attacked on all sides by swarms of bees and wasps and birds of prey. The shepherds begin to irrigate the fields and drive away the swarms and birds. Can this activity be termed pastoral? In theory, certainly.

            However, if at the same time the flock were under attack by packs of voracious wolves, many of them covered with sheepskins, and the pastors fought against the insects and birds without making any effort to unmask or drive away the wolves, could their work be considered

pastoral, proper to good and faithful shepherds?

            In other words, did those in the Second Vatican Council who wished to scare away the lesser adversaries but gave free rein - by their silence - to the greater adversary act as true pastors?

            Using "aggiornate" tactics (about which the least that can be said is that they are contestable in theory and proving ruinous in practice), the Second Vatican Council tried to scare away, let us say, bees, wasps, and birds of prey. But its silence about communism left full liberty to the wolves. The work of this Council cannot be inscribed as effectively pastoral either in history or in the Book of Life.

            It is painful to say this. But, in this sense, the evidence singles out the Second Vatican Council as one of the greatest calamities, if not the greatest, in the history of the Church. From the Council on, the "smoke of Satan” ⁷⁵ penetrated the Church in unbelievable proportions. And this smoke is spreading day by day, with the terrible force of gases in expansion. To the scandal of uncountable souls, the Mystical Body of Christ entered a sinister process of self-destruction, as it were.

COMMENTARY

Astonishing Calamities in the Church’s Post-Conciliar Phase

            The historic declaration of Paul VI in the allocution Resistite fortes in fide, of June 29, 1972, is fundamental for a better understanding of the calamities in the post-Conciliar phase of the Church. We quote the Poliglotta Vaticana.

            "Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father affirmed that he had the feeling the “the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God through some crack.” There is doubt, uncertainty, complexity, restlessness, dissatisfaction, confrontation. People no longer trust the Church; they trust the first secular profane prophet who speaks to us through some newspaper or social movement, running after him and asking him if he has the formula of true life. We do not realize that we are already owners and masters of it. Doubt has entered our consciences through windows that ought to be open to the light....This state of uncertainty also reigns in the Church. It was thought that after the Council the history of the Church would enter a sunny day. It entered instead a cloudy, stormy, dark, skeptical, and uncertain day. We preach ecumenism and yet we ourselves are farther and farther apart. We seek to dig abysses instead of filling them.

            How did this happen? The Pope confided one of his opinions: An adverse power has intervened. His name is the devil, the mysterious being to which Saint Peter also alludes in his Epistle. ⁷⁶

            The same Pontiff, in an allocution to the students of the Pontifical Lombard Seminary on December 7, 1968, had affirmed:

            "The Church finds herself in an hour of disquiet, of self-criticism, one might even say of self-destruction. It is like an acute and complex interior upheaval, which no one expected after the Council. One though of a blossoming, a serene expansion of the mature concepts of the Council. The Church still has this aspect of blossoming. But since “bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu,” the aspect of sorrow has become most notable. The Church is also being wounded by those who are part of her. ⁷⁷

            His Holiness John Paul II also painted a somber picture of the Church’s situation.

            "One must be realistic and acknowledge with a deep and pained sentiment that a great party of today’s Christians feel lost, confused, perplexed, and even disillusioned: ideas contradicting the revealed and unchanging Truth have been spread far and wide; outright heresies in the dogmatic and moral fields have been disseminated, creating doubt, confusion, and rebellion; even the liturgy has been altered. Immersed in intellectual and moral “relativism” and therefore in permissiveness, Christians are tempted by atheism, agnosticism, a vaguely moralistic illuminism, a sociological Christianity, without defined dogmas and without objective morality." ⁷⁸

            In a similar vein, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith, later stated:

            "Results since the Council seem to be in cruel contrast to the expectations of all, beginning with those of John XXIII and Paul VI....The Popes and the Council Fathers were expecting a new Catholic unity, and instead one has encountered a dissension that – to use the words of Paul VI – seems to have gone from self-criticism to self-destruction. A new enthusiasm was expected, but too often there has been boredom and discouragement instead. A new leap forward was expected, but instead we find ourselves facing a process of progressive decadence....It must be clearly stated that a real reform of the Church presupposes an unequivocal turning away from the erroneous paths that led to indisputably negative consequences." ⁷⁹

                        From this resulted an immense debacle for the Church and what still remains of Christian civilization. The Ostpolitik of the Vatican, for example, and the massive infiltration of communism into Catholic circles are effects of all these calamities. And they constitute additional successes of the psychological offensive of the Third Revolution against the Church.

            History narrates the innumerable dramas the Church has suffered in the twenty centuries of her existence: oppositions that germinated outside her and tried to destroy her from outside; malignancies that formed within her, were cut off by her, and thereafter ferociously tried to destroy her from outside.

            When, however, has history witnessed an attempted demolition of the Church like the present one? No longer undertaken by an adversary, it was termed a "self-destruction" in a most lofty pronouncement having world-wide repercussion. ⁸⁰

From this resulted an immense debacle for the Church and what still remains of Christian civilization. The Ostpolitik of the Vatican, for example, and the massive infiltration of communism into Catholic circles are effects of all these calamities. And they constitute additional successes of the psychological offensive of the Third Revolution against the Church.

COMMENTARY

The Vatican Ostpolitik

            On reading these lines about Ostpolitik, someone could ask if the enormous changes that took place in Russia resulted from an ingenious move by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

            Perhaps the Vatican, on the basis of the best information, foresaw that communism, corroded by internal crises, would begin in its turn to self-destruct. And to encourage the world headquarters of materialistic atheism to this autodemolition, the Catholic Church, situated on the other extreme of the ideological spectrum, feigned her own destruction. Perhaps this is what led communism to markedly diminish its persecution of the Church. After all, if both were moribund, and arrangement would be understandable. In other words, it is to the flexibility of the Church that we should attribute the conditions for the flexibility of the communist world.

            It would be fitting to reply that if the members of the Sacred Hierarchy knew that indigence and ruin would force communism to self-destruct, they should have denounced the misery and convoked all the peoples of the West to prepare the way for rehabilitating Russia and the world as soon as communism effectively collapsed.

            They should not have remained silent, letting the phenomenon evolve without benefiting from Catholic influence and the generous and solicitous cooperation of Western governments , since only this denunciation could have prevented the Soviet collapse from reaching its present dead end, wherein everything is misery and imbroglio.

            In any case, it is false to say that the self-destruction of the Church has hastened the self-destruction of communism – unless there were a secret treaty between the two in this regard.

            But such a treaty – or suicidal pact – would lack any legitimacy and usefulness for the Catholic world, not to mention everything in this mere hypothesis of offense to the popes in whose pontificates this double euthanasia was supposedly arranged.

B.                   The Church: Today’s Center of Conflict Between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution

            In 1959, the year we wrote Revolution and the Counter-Revolution, the Church was considered the great spiritual force against the worldwide expansion of the communist sect.

            In 1976, innumerable ecclesiastics, including bishops, figure as accomplices by omission, as collaborators, and even as driving forces of the Third Revolution. Progressivism, installed almost everywhere, is converting the formerly verdant forest of the Catholic Church into wood that can easily be set afire by communism.

            In a word, the extent of this change is such that we do not hesitate to affirm that the center - the most sensitive and truly decisive point in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution - has shifted from the temporal to the spiritual society.

            The Holy Church is now this center. In her, progressivists, cryptocommunists, and procommunists confront antiprogressivists and anticommunists. ⁸¹