Catholicism v. Nominalism: Denunciation of Vatican Council II

By Joseph Andrew Settanni

The advance of postmodernity, into the 21st century, has seen the full fruits of the results of the rabid pursuit of what had been regarded as modernity, often called the modern project, which includes abortion, artificial contraception, infanticide, euthanasia, sexually transmitted diseases, homosexuality, pornography, etc., meaning the vindication of human hubris.

The postmodern thrust is most clearly seen, therefore, in the expanding and intensifying worship of death, usually called the culture of death; the human race, denying the rights and existence of God, actively seeks self-extermination with its normally decreasing birthrates and increased sterility observed around the world; it is, thus, a manifestly manmade demographic nightmare nihilistically engulfing a much too willing humanity.

Of course, the cancerous roots of this profoundly spiritual crisis, meaning the nihilistic choosing of a completely intramundane-immanentist eschatology, go deep. What started as an intellectual tendency much earlier in the history of Western thought became first “codified” in philosophical terms by an aberrant English Franciscan Scholastic, William of Ockham or Occam (c. 1287–1347), with his subjectivist and relativist advocacy of nominalism, which, later in time, was also fairly called (appropriately enough) Occamism. And, as Richard M. Weaver had noted long ago, ideas have consequences.

Admittedly, nominalism, which ultimately leads to nihilism, is very epistemologically seductive and even most of its adherents rarely, if ever, become conscious of its supremely thoroughgoing hold upon them.

For instance, the needed denunciation of the gigantic religious/theological heresy of Modernism, by Pope St. Pius X, would have been impossible to truly comprehend (as to the precise reason for the condemnation’s vital need) without the prior success of the development of the important intellectual error known as nominalism in cognition, for there is no greater deception than self-deception.

It is the true basis of Modernism that, in its turn, intellectually and psychologically further empowers the liberals, radicals, dissidents, and progressives both, e. g., within and without the Roman Catholic Church. Holding office from 1903 to 1914 and the only Holy Father canonized since Pope St. Pius V, his Pascendi dominici gregis (Encyclical against Modernism, 1907) had quite correctly recognized Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.”

To this important point, in the modern mind as exemplary of modernity, ideological thought has substantially replaced religious contemplation as being the primary mode of mental cognitivity and ethical judgment. Furthermore, the obvious and highly demonic success of the destructive power of the results of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) would have been impossible and inconceivable without the baleful influence and dominance attained by the many and ever multiplying errors spawned freely by this philosophical point of view that had cancerously spread into many areas of theology, politics, science, etc.

But, truth can still fight against error. Intellectual decay need not be permanent, even into the 21st century.

Defining Catholicism qua Roman Catholic Church

Prior to the modernist, postconciliar Church created the Second Vatican Council with its quite enormous and radical changes of doxology, liturgy, Christology, eschatology, soteriology, etc., Catholicism could be encompassed by three simple propositions or principles; all else, the Seven Sacraments, Apostle’s Creed, Communion of Saints, etc., could then be clearly seen as simply the logical infrastructure in requisite support of these foundational and essential principles.

Catholicism is an exoteric, not esoteric, belief, as is the latter case with any variety of Gnosticism, by whatever euphemism. Why? These three propositions manifestly explain why: 1.) Jesus is the Christ, 2.) the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, and 3.) the Catholic faith is the only true faith. The preconciliar Church, the intellectual, moral and spiritual revolution starting in the first century AD, had no substantive or substantial doubts whatsoever as to all of its fundamental dogmas, doctrines, and teachings. It valiantly withstood the attempted counterrevolutions of the Arian heresy, Albigensians, and Protestant Revolt, though, of course, the insidious counterrevolution of the Second Vatican Council is still troubling the Church.

Nonetheless, Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium, the three pillars of the Faith, as could then be understood, totally upheld the Truth, meaning the veracity and universality of the Faith. Thus, nothing as to the inherent validity of the dogmas, doctrines, and teachings was thought to be in need of questioning, unlike the overt tendency of the postconciliar Church. The post-Vatican II Church, unfortunately, became both intellectually and psychologically contaminated by, in this following order of descending importance, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, and Gestalt Theory through the influence of Vatican II and, especially, its morally and spiritually devastating aftermath.

The three aforementioned principles/propositions became then completely untenable within the nominalist context of those four cited, highly “acidic” philosophical and sophistic systems of thought. Existentialist and other kinds of questioning (and often cognate confrontational attitudes) continually expanded, especially in the minds of the radicals, dissidents, etc.; even many so-called moderates still felt the itch to be in an interrogatory mood. One can see that it ought to be rather supremely obvious, as a consequence, that all of traditionalist, orthodox Roman Catholicism is, thus, both logically incompatible and inherently antithetical to nominalism and all of its implications and ramifications as well.

Thus, the traditional (often falsely denominated narrowly as just Tridentine) Latin Mass is well hated by almost all the liberals, radicals, dissidents, freethinkers, and progressives (aka nominalists) both within and without the Roman Catholic Church, which is no real or startling surprise. Anything that so ardently and repeatedly reaffirms the three forever complementary pillars of the Faith: Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium, meaning the Latin Mass, cannot, logically speaking, be greatly loved or eagerly promoted by almost all sincerely committed defenders of Vatican II. For as William F. Buckley, Jr. was fond of pointedly quoting Leon Trotsky: Who says A must say B. Q. E. D.

The Matter Itself Defined

But, what is nominalism? Simply put, it is the explicit denial of there being any universals; the doctrine that general ideas or abstract concepts, meaning as being mere necessities of thought or conveniences of language, are simply names without any true corresponding reality and that, in fact, only particular objects exist; there are, therefore, no universal essences whatsoever.

The nominalist contends, e. g., that one can see an individual man, a human being, but there can be no universal term that talks about man as an abstract category as if it possessed any reality. Thus, an individual person has a human nature qua real being; but, the universality of a human nature qua nature of humanity does not philosophically exist. There are, as other examples, individual dogs or cats; there is, however, no universal “thing” that can be specified as dog or cat.   Words such as liberty, freedom, truth, beauty, justice, etc. are said to be mere abstractions qua semantic devices having no true substance whatsoever.

The inherent and integral and unavoidable contradictions and conundrums, involved in such a bold contention, get rudely pushed aside in the subjective-relativist rush toward upholding the nominalist asseveration, meaning totally regardless of the actuality of the matters discussed. Objectivity and subjectivity, among other basic noetic results, get necessarily reversed within the scope of human understanding and comprehension, not surprisingly. It is, in short, Occam’s Razor gone mad.

Thus, ultimately, it is the extremely anomalous positing that metaphysics can exist without any reference to a metaphysical order (as if a river could be composed without any water); a once truly radical or extremist point of view that, today, is held to be completely normal. It is, therefore, as to its logical consequences, a world seeking to be entirely bereft of God and, finally, of sanity itself in the cause of pursuing nominalism to its final epistemological conclusion.

One can see, as with, e. g., Communism, how an ersatz religion (or the oddity of a secularist religion) qua ideology can induce people to murder millions of their fellow human beings, though not ever thinking that such slaughter is clearly indicative of insanity. If this can be understood, however, then the true meaning, implications, and ramifications of modernity are then revealed.

Objective knowledge, unfortunately, becomes difficult to grasp whenever Occamism operates on the human brain. And, further, objectivity itself has its very existence questioned when this kind of “logic” gets worked upon over time; both philosophy and political philosophy, as consequences, have become progressively corrupted as the centuries have passed such that, for the vast majority of people, nominalism has simply become an unrecognized pandemic attitude and accepted orientation of thought within all of modern civilization.

But, there are continuing philosophical problems left unresolved. How can, in fact, the particularity of a particular being, said to be human, be then held to be possible or plausible without a prior paradigmatic conception of what it is that gets properly defined as human, especially a human nature? How could, by extension, someone be said to possess a human nature without there being the definition of a nature that is applicable, by definition, to a human being and, thus, to all human beings who have ever lived or, of course, are alive now?

The moderate realism approach of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, along with most of Platonic thought, gets weirdly turned upside down and inside out in the effort to create an Occamist worldview where there are no universals imaginable (read: permitted). There were, as to the reductionist mentality involved, many consequences, as could be guessed, in the field of intellectual or political-intellectual history.

For instance, the 18th century Enlightenment’s deification of Reason witnessed a modern form of (liberal) tyranny (or insanity) then known as enlightened despotism; this fitted in well, in turn, with Rousseau’s contention, e. g., that men had to be forced to be free, which logically originated, of course, the concept of democratic despotism as a means of (insane) progressive liberation, of creating the New Eden on earth, Utopianism. (The logical end results, in their turn, lead to both Nazi death camps and Communist gulags in the 20th century, for the road to Utopia always takes the path toward necessary dehumanization, due to the ideological rationalization of murder on a grand scale.)

By the early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, could gratuitously, meaning just passingly, dismiss all of Natural Law as being only “Nonsense on Stilts” in his aggressive efforts at the totalist (insane) rationalization of human life, culture, law, civilization, and society. Modernity, thus, vigorously so spreads philosophical/metaphysical ignorance and, therefore, continuously incapacitates the human mind from reasoning correctly about fundamental matters concerning the human condition and the consequences of the thoughts and actions of fallen creatures living in a fallen world; sin itself gets ignored, of course; rationality qua right reason gets wrongly confused with Rationalism, a form of ideological insanity.

Champions of modernity, such as Bentham, have been, in the 20th and into the 21st century, fortunately confronted by such learned writers as: Hadley Arkes, J. Budziszewki, Frederick Copleston, S.J, Anthony Esolin, Étienne Gilson, John H. Hallowell, Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Alasdair MacIntyre, Fr. C. N. R. McCoy, E. B. F. Midgley, Thomas P. Neill, Michael Oakeshott, Josef Pieper, Heinrich A. Rommen, James V. Schall, S.J., Leo Strauss, J. L. Talmon, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, and Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Nominalism, therefore, has not gone unchallenged, though it has been, honestly speaking, largely triumphant. Communism alone has consumed well over 100 million lives so far. With positivism energetically added to rationalism, the positivist understanding of law qua legality itself confidently ascribes all human rights and law as coming only from the State, not God; a completely desacralized, secularized, world is to be the final logical result, the atheist Utopia, the Workers’ Paradise, the New Eden on earth, as was once seen, e. g., in the Soviet Union or Maoist China, meaning savage utopian (or is it dystopian?) experiments in applied terror, ideological genocide, and mass murder on a gargantuan scale. The Devil always demands blood offerings for all attempts to attain Godlessness in this world on either a grand scale of human sacrifice or the minor level of abortion qua human sacrifice.

One can meaningfully add that the highly fashionable modern themes of naturalism, materialism, and atheism, cognitive allies of Nazism, Communism and Fascism, became widely celebrated by most intellectuals. In various ways and under different and diverse euphemisms, furthermore, the nihilistic Nietzschean superman became glorified as an ideal of any truly modern society and civilization. And, to use a much needed neologism, “utopianization” eventually became the predominant postmodern lust of the vast majority of intellectuals, academics, journalists, and their fellow travelers.

This is consistent fully with a “value neutral” approach toward the idea of truth itself. Secularization, rationalization, and bureaucratization do now successfully uphold modernity; and, thus, Godlessness is the basic and widely accepted norm as is strengthened by an intellectual, social, and cultural neopaganism in the contemporary world.

It is not surprising, upon historical reflection, that the Western European capacity to think cogently, clearly, and precisely was damaged seemingly irreparably when Occamist Scholasticism came to generally replace the dominance of Thomistic Scholasticism at most of the major universities. This has had disastrous results. That unfortunate intellectual transition was a fatal intellectual error of an enormous magnitude, which produced degenerative consequences, both cognitively and morally.

Thus, e. g., Martin Luther, educated primarily by nominalist-inspired teachers of theology, was then supplied with many currents of reasoning that conformed easily toward the creation of Protestantism, the truest theological expression of nominalism ever fashioned or conceived by mortal man: sola Scriptura and sola fide. Someone can actually think of himself as being a good Protestant who, in effect, constitutes his own church and acts as his own pope, in the spirit of individualism writ large.


The metaphysical order qua Supreme Being becomes flexible and adaptable to the variable and various (read: Protestant) belief needs or values of diverse kinds or types of Christians. From the Catholic point of view, however, it was obviously blasphemous to the nth degree for the so-called Reformers to, thus, reform God; Protestant converts to Catholicism get the point. But, one ought to be able to plainly see how Protestantism blends in quite well with the flow and logic of modernity.

The Protestant Revolt was and necessarily remains, therefore, the vainglorious and forever dubious theological effort at (supposedly) achieving the reformation of the Lord. This is easily proven empirically in how dozens of sects had expanded into, first, hundreds and now continuingly thousands upon thousands of sects that continue to multiply; the so-called Reformation is endless because God must be made to conform to the dictates of a multiplicity of divergent and disputational consciences, which process displays the forever inherent and integral irrationality of Protestantism, of course.

What needs to be properly understood, however, is the critical difference between modernity as a mode of thought and the mere advent of the modern age; the latter is dated usually with the arrival of at least the 16th century and acts, in this article, as only a chronological measure for giving dates. Earlier, Machiavelli and the secular side of the Renaissance developed the various strands of thinking that had further and further empowered nominalism and created modernity in human cognition as being simply the “normal” way of seeing human reality; whatever was thought of as supernatural, in contrast, was then more and more relegated to the dismissed arena of superstitious or childish speculation held as just unworthy of an adult or mature mentality.

Pre-modernity in thought, covering the classical and medieval eras, had allowed for only one universe of discourse and dialogue by which, for instance, St. Thomas Becket and Henry II could argue centered around and fixed within one intellectual-theological cosmos of thought. Classical Natural Law teachings, right reason, and, ultimately for the Middle Ages, the overall force of Christianity had then informed the conscience of Western man. Christendom, the Kingdom of Christ, used to exist wherever Christian men stood. But, as to the noted argumentation of this present article, nominalism (aka modernity) and Catholicism are understood to be incompatible, irreconcilable, as modes of thought because of each’s permanently contradictory principles. This has had terrible consequences.

As was critically noted by Alasdair MacIntyre, St. Thomas More and Henry VIII, some centuries later, were fundamentally unable to converse within the same universe of cognition, unlike Becket and Henry II.

For instance, in the pre-modern conception of legality qua law, the common and logical presumption was that something was assumed to be illegal and impermissible, regardless of whether one could cite a specific law against an action or activity, unless found to be otherwise. In the opposed realm of nominalist-inspired modernity, however, something was thought to be legal and permissible if there were no law prohibiting it; a then total reversal in substantive thinking, as is commented on by MacIntyre, had occurred as but one consequence, among many, of the baleful rise of secularism in Western society and culture; things had to be cognitively explicit; all mysteries, ultimately, were to be perceived as being just superstitious nonsense; reductionism is to hold sway over the human mind.

This rationalist attitude was famously denounced by Edmund Burke in citing how it proceeds that a queen is but a woman and a woman is but an animal. For Henry VIII, an early Protestant, as the instructive and interesting example chosen, the mere exercise of his will could make “law” to exist, though for the sake of pro forma matters, paper documents got created to merely ratify what had, in fact, been “legally” done. He was a true “student” of Machiavelli. Moreover, he saw nothing unusual, wrong, or impermissible in simply making himself his own pope of his own church, as had been once the case with the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire and its Byzantine Church for a number of centuries; this is known as caesaropapism or erastianism.

The inoffensive rubber stamp (aka English Parliament) eagerly agreed, of course, with Henry, meaning as to its, the Anglican Church’s creation, then obvious and undisputed legality qua law. Protestantism, with its ever growing spiritual individualism and explicitness of worship, paved the way for the destructive growth of secularism and liberalism and progressivism in the Western world. An anthropocentric, not theocentric, modern society and culture had, increasingly, arisen by which Man had displaced God as the notable center of attention.

The rationalization of human life simply assumed that God was a fiction. As the centuries past, such figures as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and John Locke had encouraged increasing secularization; Kant and Hegel further rationalized the supposed need for it. Later, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud made atheism seem scientific and, thus, more palatable and respectable in its pretensions. At last, even Catholicism could not totally resist the infection of secularist influences that came, in the later 19th and into the 20th century, to steadily corrupt faith by the efforts made to supposedly modernize it to be more in harmony with modernity; and, of course, there were logical consequences.

Many largely Protestant principles of thought, as the modern centuries had then passed, went (not unexpectedly) through the aforementioned prominent heresy of Modernism and into, both directly and indirectly, the pernicious and dangerous doings of Vatican II (VCII). Contrary to much contemporary fiction on the subject, it was not at all about reform and continuity as to an intended instantiation of orthodoxy; it is primarily about discontinuity or rupture.

Why else have countless people, inclusive of Catholics, spoken freely of and thousands of volumes written using the term of "postconciliar Church" as if it were an established fact?   Many history books have, of course, been composed openly using the chronological, ideational, cultural, sociological, etc. division of there being a pre-Vatican II and a post-Vatican II Church.   As with the infamous and barbaric War to End All Wars (aka World War I), was it, in effect, the Council to End All Councils?

A Theological Consequence Mentioned

This was overtly seen in how the so-called Spirit of Vatican II is usually compared to or against the Letter of Vatican II, in a Hegelian dialectic, to then produce the synthesis now being still formulated as to the true meaning of it having supposedly been orthodox, after all is said and done.

Or, such is a contention made, since at least the 1980s, that a major misinterpretation had, in fact, occurred. In the minds of many, subscription to the principles of the theological thinking, produced by that gathering, are now assumed to be the very touchstone of modern, Catholic religious orthodoxy; any dissent is, at a minimum, considered to be rather religiously suspect, not just impolite. This shows, quite vividly, the pervasive and manifest power of nominalism to have its harmful ability to cause significant pernicious rot, within the human mind, in the dreadful willingness to believe that which is not really true.

That 1960s gathering, in Rome, was definitely not the supposed genuine harbinger of any truly reinvigorated Catholic orthodoxy, as history and much else has definitely shown. A good tree yields good fruit; a bad tree gives bad fruit. But, such enduring Gospel truth is completely set aside, the clear words of Jesus Himself are ignored, all for the pitiful sake of defending, of protecting, the memory of Vatican II, which was called into existence by Pope John XXIII. Moreover, the quite pervasiveness and pandemic reality of Occamism can be seen readily well beyond the field of theology or various kinds of religious speculation.

What is meant? All the ideologies of modernity, meaning inclusive of Conservatism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Liberalism, Anarchism, Libertarianism, Feminism, etc. can be then traced through many kinds of philosophical attitudes such as materialism, hedonism, secularism, humanism, subjectivism, pragmatism, positivism, nihilism, reductionism, etc. back to their root or fundamental cause: Nominalism.

Unsurprisingly, every heresy attacking Catholicism can be drawn, either directly or indirectly, to the same source or, rather, mental contagion; and, moreover, the desacralized and neopagan West, without a doubt, is now intellectually and morally disarmed in the face of an increasingly militant and aggressive Islam. In turn, postmodernism in thought (deconstructionism, etc.) would be inconceivable without a prior modernism in cognition; both modernism and postmodernism, as popularly understood, are ultimately traceable to the germinal nominalist point of view.

Machiavellianism is, of course, the well-known political expression of this mental orientation that has done so much to shape the contemporary world, long after the death of that particular Florentine civil servant, whose very name became synonymous with evil; one can, e. g., profitably read Leo Strauss’ Thoughts on Machiavelli, for gaining more intimate knowledge of the truly significant harm done to the Western and, by extension, Modern World. All such varieties of modernity and postmodernity in thought, therefore, necessarily come to corrupt and pervert, debase and debauch, even the best of intentions because of significant error being firmly rooted at the bottom of all such thought.


As could be guessed by now, meaning from what has been above mentioned, the Catholic Church will not be able to successfully rid itself of the disastrous results of VCII until all ecclesial and theological thinking, within the Church, repudiates entirely and adamantly the cognition known as nominalism; ideas do have consequences, which cannot be frequently stated enough. Repeated efforts to somehow or other salvage and rehabilitate, reclaim and acclimatize, VCII, therefore, are ultimately doomed to failure and frustration because the initial errors involved have not and cannot be repudiated, logically, as long as it is officially declared to be a theologically valid Church council.

The ever-tenacious, nominalist thinking involved, at the corrupt core of VCII, will trump forever any and all attempts to supposedly civilize and canonize the wild Occamist beast, the nominalist-oriented theology, let loose upon the world Catholic community. A good tree yields good fruit; a bad tree bears bad fruit. The too often assumed or presumed “good intentions” of that past ecclesial assembly are functionally much too ethereal and, ultimately, cannot be measured empirically; the results, however, can and have been tabulated substantially in the negative column of what are mainly doleful consequences, meaning truly dreadful results.

The constant defenders of the Second Vatican Council, hypnotized demonically by the Hegelian dialectic, seem to wish that Jesus ought to have blessed, not cursed, the sterile fig tree. The thought that Christ the Lord is supremely right and they, consequently, are axiomatically wrong has not, in fact, occurred to them so far. Where, however, is the notable failure to be detected? Just where, consequently, has Pope Benedict XVI committed his continued basic error in reasoning?

A corrupted theology (the thinking of Vatican Council II) remains as it is; this is when that which evilly services its own integral corruption remains willfully unrecognized and unchallenged, meaning directly as to the crux of its then erroneous interpretation of true Catholicism, found always within the highly indicative nominalist directions of the documents definitively produced by that council.

Occamism, therefore, must be entirely purged from the Catholic mind forever in an important kind of much needed consciousness-raising exercise; there is, actually, no other rational or theological choice, as would also be indicated by Thomistic Scholasticism. Not surprisingly, Thomism can, in addition, be properly used to oppose the Modernism that was denounced by Pope St. Pius X. Any ambiguity of VCII texts, as is often noted, speaks to that which is then ambiguous as to supposed teachings; ambiguity is devilish; clearness of thought and expression, doctrinal Catholicity, exemplifies truth and its requisite defense, as with, e. g., Catholic dogmas.

The need for continuing interpretation and added reinterpretation of the texts created bespeaks intellectual treachery within those VCII document sources, not (genuine) Catholicism. Why is it that a council, dedicated explicitly toward an openness, aggiornamento, of the Church to the modern world, ended up creating the continuing need to clarify and reclarify alleged misinterpretations, purported misunderstandings, of its overt teachings? Supposedly, they were not meant to be esoteric in nature or require constant revisionist exegesis. A deliberate effort at intentional obfuscation is, thus, often suspected. Must these confusing documents be made canonical as if equivalent to Scripture?

The Correction Needed

The Faith of the Ages, as well defined by all of the Doctors of the Church, must be set forever against the horror that is and will ever remain as VCII. The proper and orthodox knowledge, understanding, and comprehension of Catholicism qua the universal Faith must, therefore, be used as the weapon to finally kill the unholy beast. The current Holy Father’s overt favoring of the Latin Mass is at least indicative of a troubled conscience; this is surely as to the predominantly harmful consequences, the terrible aftermath, of that past historic assembly.

However, because Pope Benedict XVI is still too tightly bound to the doings and history of that council as to its implementation and interpretation for a number of decades now, it is something that the next pope will, one hopes, do without any great hesitation. The fear of a possible religious schism needs to be overcome in the defense of Catholic truth; courage and confidence is needed, more than ever, as to this proposed public affirmation of the Faith.

A strongly worded papal bull [perhaps called De Ecclesia Universalis] ought to be issued stating, openly and clearly, that no Catholics are to think that they are theologically bound to adhere to the VCII as to its, thus, supposedly having any dogmatic authority whatsoever. There is, consequently, to no longer be any artificial or other supposed division within the continuing historical reality of the Church of a so-called preconciliar and postconciliar Church.

The document should declare explicitly and boldly that there is and has been only One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church on earth, meaning the Roman Catholic Church, of course. Until all of the above is actually done and with such requisite papal authority, there will be, within the Church, two antithetical liturgies and two contradictory theologies greatly indicative of a strangely schizophrenic and troubled ecclesial structure; as a result, the Novus Ordo will be, of course, then representative of a postconciliar religious establishment and the traditional Latin Mass, the now Extraordinary Rite as so titled, will showcase the preconciliar version. It is still currently the case that the popular mind, as is readily known, sees a definitive and, moreover, prescriptive historical break, a kind of schism, in Church history concerning all that happened before and then all that has/will happen after VCII.

It is a Hegelian-nominalist sword aimed at the heart of unity, of universality, of what it is supposed to mean to be truly Catholic in one’s beliefs. One can read such insightful and instructive books as The Great Façade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church by Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Over the course of time, given enough centuries, there will develop two separate churches, as with the example of the Eastern Orthodox Church as being its own establishment.

And, this is one of the great dangers involved with a continued adherence to VCII, though no one council, in and of itself, has ever been considered as being so extremely vital to the essential existence and definition of the Church. Many respectfully ask why VCII must, therefore, become the one and only exception, as if it has come to superbly define the very nature and intrinsic reality of all of the Church itself, in some strange way.

The hoped-for action needed to be taken by the next pope would be a much long overdue slap directly across the face of nominalism, besides the chance to slay the creature let loose by an aberrant council. Of course, there will be those who still say that the deliberations of VCII were (supposedly) guided by the Holy Spirit; and, one knows, however, that the Devil also quotes Scripture. It is known that a spiritual delusion occurred, of course, by which the there gathered prelates, clerics, and others thought that the proceedings were all (more or less) blessed. Some, at least, who had actually attended were not so (easily) convinced of the too often just assumed holiness of what went on there.

Among others, Bishop James Henry Ambrose Griffiths (July 16, 1903—February 24, 1964), STD, newly come back from that Council, told about the heretical forces and powers that were unfortunately at work; he had wept sadly over those absolutely questionable ecumenical proceedings; he did not rejoice.

Conclusion

Among the many conveniently continuing myths of the 21st ecumenical council, it needs be mentioned, is that it took decades before anyone really realized the tenacious force of the fundamental theological errors that were erroneously and knowingly propounded by certain theologians there; moreover, the extended allied contention is then made that the integrally harmful consequences were almost totally unforeseen and, in fact, almost unknown at that time, which was related to the apostasy involved. Such wishful thinking is, however, inherently fallacious.

There was, therefore, the mostly deliberate enunciating of boldly heretical teachings often disguised within ambiguous language, semantic games, seductively designed to confuse unwary minds. Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Trojan Horse in the City of God, written in the 1960s, provides instructive reading. Being both a convert from Protestantism and, moreover, a Doctor of Sacred Theology, that champion of Holy Mother Church, Bishop Griffiths, easily and readily knew heresy when he saw it on display and supported vigorously.

Someone could have surely asked him then if he thought that the Holy Ghost was well pleased by the doings of the Second Vatican Council. A good tree yields good fruit; a bad tree bears bad fruit. Only traditionalist, orthodox Catholicism can save civilization by fighting against the culture of death. Q. E. D.

Athanasius contra mundum!


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Thomas P. Neill, The Rise and Decline of Liberalism. ____. Makers of the Modern Mind. ____. Religion and Culture.

Gerhart Niemeyer, The Communist Ideology. ____. Between Nothingness and Paradise. ____. Aftersight and Foresight.

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. ____. On Human Conduct. ____. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism. ____. Hobbes on Civil Association. ____. What Is History? ____. The Vocabulary of a Modern European State.

Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language Abuse of Power. ____. For the Love of Wisdom. ____. In Defense of Philosophy. ____. The Four Cardinal Virtues.

Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought. ____. The Natural Law.

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., Roman Catholic Political Philosophy. ____. Christianity and Politics. ____. The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy. ____. Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy. ____. At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From the "Brilliant Errors" to the Things of Uncommon Importance. ____. The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays.

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History. ____. On Tyranny. ____. Persecution and the Art of Writing. ____. Liberalism, Ancient and Modern. ____. Thoughts on Machiavelli. ____. What Is Political Philosophy? ____. The City and Man. ____. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.

J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. ____. The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarisation in the Twentieth Century. ____. Political Messianism – the Romantic Phase.

Stephen Tonsor, Equality, Decadence, and Modernity. Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolution.

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Christianity and Political Philosophy. ____. Being and Knowing. ____. Man’s Knowledge of Reality.

Bertram D. Wolfe, Marxism. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

References

www.michael-oakeshott-association.com/
http://www.morec.com/schall/
www.leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/