The quirky, neo-medieval American Catholicism that was destroyed by Vatican II

Joseph Bottum, the managing editor of the neocon Christian journal First Things, is someone I consider an enemy of America, for he seeks open borders for Mexican immigrants and has said that if we stopped Muslims from immigrating into the U.S., we would be as evil as the terrorists. As a Catholic, however, he is not an enemy of the Catholic Church. While he seeks the destruction of the American national culture by Mexicans (see my discussion of Mary Ann Glendon’s appalling, mindless call for open borders, which he published and endorsed in First Things), he regrets the destruction of Church traditions by Vatican II. Thus he makes a nice analogy between the famous swallows that over the past 20 years have stopped coming to the historic San Juan Capistrano Mission in Orange County, California (an interesting place that includes the oldest surviving Catholic church in California), and the rich, sometimes oddball traditions of American Catholicism in the 1950s that were banished by the Church in the interests of modernization:

An entire culture nested in the crossbeams and crannies, the nooks and corners, of the Catholic Church. And it wasn’t until the swallows had been chased away that anyone seemed to realize how much the Church itself needed them, darting around the chapels and flitting through the cathedrals. They provided beauty, and eccentricity, and life. What they did, really, was provide Catholicism to the Catholic Church in America, and none of the multimedia Masses and liturgical extravaganzas in the years since—none of the decoy nests and artificial puddles—has managed to call them home. All the mission bells will ring, / The chapel choir will sing, / When the swallows come back to Capistrano.

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Tom S. writes:

A fine and perceptive comment on Bottum, which nicely illustrates the schizoid nature of many “modern” conservative Catholics. Bottum rightly deplores the impacts of Vatican II on the Church, while supporting an insane, immoral, ahistorical, and anti-American immigration policy that is the product of … wait for it … Vatican II!

This ties in with many of the problems that conservative Catholics have with Pope John Paul II. JPII was a large-hearted, good, intelligent, and in some cases even saintly man, but from Vatican II on, he was the architect of many of the policies that have brought the Church to its present pass, and until Catholics like Bottum can admit this, they are going to have a difficult time in helping to return the Church to its true mission of spreading the Gospels, not spreading liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 15, 2006 04:23 PM | Send