Vat-2

Rev dear Rev: Is it now respectable to say that Vatican II was a disaster for the wider Churches?

No. This opinion first appears in modern respectable histories of that sorry era in the book by Dr DCL Edwards, “A Concise History of English Christianity”, (London:1998), page 155. Respectability is one thing, history quite another. Other books of the period have followed this otherwise astute and able History such as Mass Exodus and Phoenix Arising and so on, to say not least also among cardinals of the Roman apostolic See, but the historian above DCL Edwards offers perhaps the most chilling and sober analysis of the council and says that Catholicism was doing very well up to the council and that the check for Catholicism came from among their own number, from someone called John XXIII, and DCL he says it was a total disaster. But we shall see, this is only the beginning of a much larger debate. It is incumbent on us not to gainsay that debate. As an able anglican historian, it seems we might adumbrate that anglicans see it only as a numerical disaster, though we note with some satisfaction that catholic churches were relatively full throughout the 1970s and 1980s right up to 2005, and then something happened, but this was long after the council. Another history of the period might yet have to be written, and one that puts the council in context as called on the strength of a vision that John XXIII had whilst praying in a chapel in Rome. Mysterious times, mysterious happenings. But it is an open question as to what happened to all the traditionalists that went out of regular church practice, and all of the anglicans who came into the catholic masses in that timeframe. Certainly, not everybody agrees with the anglican historian above.